Iceblock Creator devastated by Google, Apple decision to delete the application after pressure from the “authoritarian diet”

US prosecutor Pam Bondi said such follow -up endangers immigration and customs agents. But users and developers of applications say that it is their right of first amendment to capture what the ice does in their neighborhoods – and maintain that most users turn to these platforms in order to protect their own security while President Donald Trump intensifies the aggressive application of immigration across the country.

Iceblock, the most widely used of ice tracking applications in the Apple App Store, is one of the applications that have been removed. Bondi said that his office had contacted Apple on Thursday “demanding that they withdraw the ice strap” and saying that it “is designed to put ice agents in danger just to do their job”.

Apple quickly complied, sending an e-mail Thursday to the creator of the application, Joshua Aaron, who said that he would block other application downloads because the new information “provided to Apple by the police” showed that the application has broken the rules of the App Store.

According to the email, which Aaron shared with the Associated Press, Apple declared that the application had violated the company policies “because its objective is to provide information on the location on the agents of the application of the laws which can be used to harm these agents individually or in a group.”

In an interview on Friday, Aaron denounced the company to look at what he described as “an authoritarian diet”. And defenders of immigration rights like Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center, added that these actions have marked “a disturbing example of the way technological companies capitulate in Trump”.

“These applications are a rescue buoy for communities living in uncertainty and fear of the moment when ice could arise to tear their families,” Matos said in a statement.

Application downloads like Iceblock have increased since Trump took up his secondary term earlier this year. Aaron said he launched the application in April as a way to help immigrant communities protect himself from surprise raids or potential harassment. It had more than a million users, he said.

Although it does not specify details on the total number of deleted platforms, Apple confirmed on Friday at AP that they deleted “similar applications” due to potential security risks that have been raised by the police. Google has followed their move, saying that several similar applications have violated their policies for Android platforms.

Although some defenders do not find all of these applications particularly useful – pointing potential information and false alarms – they have echoed movements to delete them.

“What really worries me is the kind of preceding that it defines” where the government can “essentially dictate the types of applications that people have on their phones,” said Civil Rights Alejandra Carabalo, who works at Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard University.

Caraballo said that outside of the United States, government pressure to block applications was “a kind of brand brand of an authoritarian regime”, as when Chinese pressure in 2019 led Apple to withdraw an application that allowed the Hong Kong demonstrators to follow the police.

Bondi warned during the summer against applications that allow people to communicate on the location of police officers and specifically called Aaron de Iceblock.

“We are looking at him and he would better be careful because it is not a protected speech,” said Bondi in a July interview on Fox News.

These warnings degenerated last month after a shooter opened fire on an installation of ice in Dallas. Managers such as FBI director Kash Patel said the shooter had looked for applications that followed the presence of ice agents, although they did not say if he really used one of the applications or if one of them played a role in the attack.

Aaron said that linking the applications to the applications did not make sense because the application only works if someone else signals ice activity within a 5 -mile radius from another iPhone user.

“You don’t need an application to know that ICE agents are in an ice detention center,” he said. “It’s just an easy excuse for them to use their power and their lever effect to eliminate something that exposed what they do – and it is the terror that they invoke on the inhabitants of this nation every day.”

He also said that the application had operated in a similar way to popular navigation applications like Waze, Google Maps and the Apple MAPS application, which allow users to report the police speed traps.

It is “not illegal in any way, a form or a form, and he does not do anyone,” he said, adding that Ice Block is also “an early alert system for people”.

Those who use applications or other online methods to monitor ICE activity say that most people who use them do for their own safety or for their loved ones.

“People are extremely afraid at the moment,” said Sherman Austin, who founded Stop Ice Raids Alert Network in February. He stressed that growing fears around racial profiling and violent arrests have an impact on families.

“They want to know what’s going on in their neighborhood and what is happening in their community,” said Austin, describing people who were doing the ground violently by glacial agents in broad daylight.

Also known as stoppe.net, the Austin platform also uses crowdsourcing, but rather allows its users to follow ice activity more widely online or via text alerts, without having to download a separate application. Austin says that the platform reached more than 500,000 subscribers on Friday.

The group also criticized the Trump administration for what it says to be reprisals targeting those who exercise their first amendment rights. Last month, the platform said he learned that the Ministry of Internal Security had assigned Meta for data on the Instagram account of Stoppece.net.

Austin said that Stopice.net had immediately challenged the action, adding on Friday that the summons is now temporarily blocked and waiting for a hearing with a judge.

Meta refused to comment on Friday. On Friday, the DHS did not respond directly to a request for comments on the assignment, rather directed the AD to a declaration of the assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin, who reiterated that the “ice monitoring applications put the lives of men and women of the application of the law in danger” and criticized the media to put pressure on the “correct decision” of the Apple.

Developers like Austin say that the moves of these applications and other federal threats should alarm everyone.

“We are faced with a regime, an administration that will operate as they wish-and threatens the person they want to get their way, in order to control the information and to control a story,” he said. “We must challenge this and fight this in all possible ways.”