(RNS) — At a recent check-in at our local U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, a friend and fellow parishioner at our Catholic church came out wearing an ankle monitor.
Several months before, in a June 2025 memo, Dawnisha Helland, ICE’s acting assistant director for management of non-detained migrants, had ordered ICE staff to place ankle monitors “whenever possible” on the more than 180,000 migrants enrolled in the alternative detention program, which allows them to stay in their communities while being processed. According to The Washington Post, fewer than 25,000 migrants were wearing ankle monitors at the time of Helland’s order.
But neither my friend nor the few of us fellow parishioners who accompanied her to her ICE check-in had gotten the memo, so to speak. We were anxious about the possibility that she would be detained. She disappeared into the back office with an interviewer. A half-hour went by. As we counted the minutes, a woman entered the lobby with a perfect little baby in a car seat and sat down in front of us. As I cooed over her baby, her chubby cheeks and the large bow tied around her head,I noticed a large black box on her mother’s ankle.
Finally, our friend walked out into the waiting room. We were so relieved to see her that the black box on her ankle did not immediately sink in.
This ankle monitor — most weigh about a pound — now marked our friend as someone dangerous, someone the state had a right to invade the privacy of and track their movements. The ankle monitor declared that she was stripped of the freedoms most of us enjoy. She was not free to go anywhere she wanted, unwatched, unmonitored, in privacy, in liberty.
This is our friend who dedicates her time to feed the homeless each day. This is our friend who has followed every law, a model citizen-applicant. She is a mother, a wife, a vibrant member of our parish community. She crosses divides between people’s languages and cultures, throws herself into learning English, passionately shares her culture with high school students and retirees alike, shows her love by cooking for friends and strangers and makes each person she meets feel seen and loved.
“I struggle to call ankle monitors humane,” the Rev. Brian Strassburger, a Jesuit priest, said in response to a question at a Zoom panel at Holy Spirit Church in Palmyra, Pennsylvania, in January. Strassburger, the founder of Del Camino Border Ministries in Brownsville, Texas, spoke about the current administration’s philosophy of immigration. “It’s not looking for more humane treatment of migrants, unfortunately,” he said. “They’re trying to make it uncomfortable and get people to leave.”
Ankle monitors are indeed uncomfortable. Our friend, whose legs swell from working on her feet eight hours a day, said hers cut into her ankle. The first night she wore it, the monitor made it impossible for her to sleep. After a week, with the help of a doctor’s note, the ankle monitor was removed and replaced with a wrist monitor.
The wrist monitor looks like a smart watch, but cannot be adjusted — or removed. My friend said she was told that she would have to “check in” via an app on her watch once a week. When the watch beeps, my friend clicks a few prompts on its screen. Then, she takes a picture of herself. Although she was told this would happen once a week, she said this happens basically daily. “I am so beautiful, ICE wants to look at me every day,” she joked to me when the check in went off in the middle of our lunch.
My friend Martha Hennessy called ankle monitors “electronic stigmata.” Hennessy wore an ankle monitor between July 2019 and August 2021. Her first stint was while she was out on bail after she and six other peace activists walked onto the U.S. Navy submarine base in Kings Bay, Georgia, to protest nuclear weapons. She wore one again after spending six months at a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut.
“It hurt constantly,” Hennessy told me by phone. The weight did not bother her so much as the blocky plastic box’s sharp edges. She wore a nylon stocking underneath to protect her skin. Hennessy, the granddaughter of American radical Dorothy Day, is an avid swimmer. She was disappointed when her parole officer initially told her she could not get the device wet except in the shower. She learned later that she could indeed swim with it. She felt that was another example of exerting control, the stealing of freedom. “It’s a torture device,” she said.
The homemade ankle monitors worn in solidarity with migrants. (Photo by Renée Roden)
Hennessy suspects the devices are big moneymakers for their manufacturers. Most of the ankle monitors used by ICE are made by BI Incorporated, a subsidiarity of GEO Group, one of the two largest private prison corporations in the United States. BI Incorporated sells, according to its website, “innovative products and services that offer an alternative to incarceration for community corrections agencies supervising individuals on parole, probation, or pretrial release.”
BI Incorporated began manufacturing the ankle bracelets in the 1970s for livestock. Since 2008, the Department of Homeland Security has awarded $188 million in contracts to BI Incorporated. BI Incorporated’s most recent contract was extended last summer without a competitive bidding process, according to The Denver Post.
In her case, Hennessy and her husband had to buy a $30-a-month dedicated phone line for the device for their Vermont farm. They paid that expense themselves — the taxes asylum seekers in the U.S. pay can end up funding their own surveillance. Austin Kocher, professor at Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University, reported on his Substack that ICE’s ankle monitors currently cost taxpayers roughly $250,000 a day. That’s around $90 million in taxpayer money to surveil their fellow taxpayers for an entire year. Kocher estimates that increased remote monitoring could cost taxpayers up to half a million dollars a day.
After our friend came out of her ICE check-in with an ankle monitor, a neighbor suggested to our weekly prayer group at the Harrisburg Catholic Worker to join in wearing ankle monitors with our friend and others like her. These monitors, he said, were like the yellow Star of David of this current moment.
When I was crafting our “ankle monitors” out of black plastic boxes and Velcro ankle straps purchased online, I was babysitting our 8-year-old Haitian neighbor. “Those look like ankle monitors,” she said.
“How do you know about ankle monitors?” I asked her.
“My neighbor has one,” she responded. “They keep you trapped in the house.” They beep, she said, to tell you not to go outside. And, she told me, you couldn’t take them into water. She wondered how her neighbor could take a shower. Her 8-year-old mind imagined that if you went into the shower, the monitor would break and the police “would think you’re outside, even though you’re in the house.”
My friend originally had the same worry. The first time she took a shower while wearing her ankle monitor, she feared it would break, and the police would barge into her home to arrest her, thinking she had gone on the lam.
Our small, crafted ankle monitors do not beep. They do not send the Department of Homeland Security an electronic ledger of our whereabouts over the course of the day. They are a fraction of the weight of a real GPS tracker, and we can remove them. In this sense, they are nothing like the weight that tens of thousands of our fellow Americans are carrying on their ankles each day.
But when I step into the shower, black band on my ankle, I instantly recall my friend’s anxiety at stepping into the shower wearing hers. I sit for a moment with her pain and fear. When I adjust the strap to make it more comfortable, I think of my friend who cannot.
As I walk into a bank, an airport security line or an important appointment — I wore mine while wedding dress shopping — I fear, for a moment, what people will think of me when they see that small black box. Will they wonder what I have done to deserve it? Will they think less of me, view me with suspicion? By marking someone with a black box on their ankle, are we signaling that they are worthy of suspicion, no matter how innocent they truly are?
For centuries, Catholics have displayed crosses on their churches, in their homes, hung around their necks. We carry around with us an instrument of torture that the Roman Empire reserved as a punishment for non-citizens. We have long demonstrated our faith in solidarity with those who are pushed to the margins and those whom the state treats as disposable, manipulable or surveillable. Our faith proclaims that solidarity with the outcast and the suspect is the road to righteousness and justice.
If you’re so inclined, join us in wearing ankle monitors this Lent. Five dollars at a local craft store can buy you a Velcro strap and small plastic box to create the seeds you need for growing solidarity with your neighbor. This small black box on our ankles invites us to enter into solidarity with those who, like Jesus of Nazareth, have committed no crime, yet have been declared suspicious and dangerous, outcasts unworthy of our pity or respect.
A regime dedicated to its own power divides our neighbors into the worthy and unworthy rather than dedicating itself to freedom and justice for all. But we don’t have to submit to its categorizations. Mark yourself suspect.
(Renée Roden, a freelance journalist and fellow at the Jesuit Media Lab, is editor of Roundtable, a newsletter covering the Catholic Worker movement. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
