One private company is benefitting financially from ICE increasingly using GPS ankle monitors to track immigrants awaiting legal proceedings instead less expensive smartphone app.
B.I. Incorporated won a contract in September 2025 initially valued at $1.02 billion to provide ankle monitors and other non-detention supervision services for ICE. The agency has so far obligated $228.5 million to the company under the contract.
B.I. Incorporated is part of the GEO Group, a business already profiting from immigration enforcement as the nation’s largest private operator of ICE detention centers.
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The ankle monitors have become a significant source of revenue, GEO Group Chairman and CEO George Zoley told investors during an August 2026 earnings conference call.
“The app is far less expensive than the ankle monitors,” Zoley said.
On the call the GEO chief also said the number of immigrants on ankle tracking devices had more than tripled from 17,000 in 2025 to 54,000 so far this year. He predicted more monitors and money from the ICE contract yet to come, particularly from scores of Haitians who recently lost Temporary Protected Status under the Trump administration.
"Most of them we believe would be placed under the ankle monitoring supervision technique,” Zoley said.
Pierre Damas Bel, 20, was one of the Haitian immigrants required by ICE to wear a GPS ankle monitor.
He posted a photo on Instagram saying the device caused "a feeling of shame and humiliation.”
Weeks later, he died after stepping out into traffic in what his family says was suicide, blaming the ankle monitor for some of his despair.
A class action lawsuit challenging the use of ankle monitors says they can cause “pain, swelling and scarring.” A declaration in the lawsuit says the stigma makes it difficult to keep a job.
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The electronic clasps are both intrusive and expensive, said Sarah Decker, senior staff attorney at the Robert and Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center.
“These devices come at enormous taxpayer expense," Decker said. “It drives up profits directly into the hands of the private prison company that is manufacturing these devices. It's not an unintended side effect. It's really the reason why this rule is implemented in our view.”
DHS disputes that money has anything to do with the increasing reliance on ankle monitors, saying they allow officers to more accurately track immigrants in supervision compared to the app.
“Illegal aliens--just like U.S. citizens--are subject to the legal system and may be subject to release conditions that include ankle or wrist-worn GPS technology,” an unnamed DHS spokesman said in an email responding to a Scripps News inquiry. "Any illegal alien who is worried about having to wear an ankle monitor or any other GPS devices should accept the $3,000 stipend from the U.S. government and free flight home by self-deporting through the CBP Home App.”
