News from TRAC

False Reporting by Contractor on Alternatives to Detention Activities

(07 Mar 2023) What lies behind ICE's frequent posting of Alternatives to Detention (ATD) data that the agency now admits was incorrect? The data ICE had been posting for months showed that use of GPS ankle monitors had been increasing. ICE now reports this is incorrect, that ankle monitor usage is in fact way down, not up.

TRAC received a partial answer in the data we received March 1, 2023, in response to one of our FOIA requests. This newly released participant-by-participant report from BI, Inc. (a subsidiary of the GEO Group), which is responsible for carrying out the ATD program, has systematically reported incorrect information to ICE, which ICE then passed along, uncorrected, to the public.

Indeed, the numbers ICE had originally posted for FY 2022 corresponded exactly to the participant-by-participant information BI, Inc. had sent ICE. This clearly wasn't an isolated problem, but a practice of systematic misreporting which has been ongoing in BI's weekly reporting to ICE. ICE's posted figures showed GPS ankle monitor usage continuing to climb from 16,444 in July 2022 to 56,805 at the beginning of December.

Misreporting involved more than the use of monitoring technologies. Substantial public funds may also be at stake. ATD costs and presumably payments due the contractor also had substantially been inflated by perhaps 31 percent as a result of these reporting errors. About 1 in 9 of the individuals BI had reported "monitoring" now showed up under the heading "no technology" with no charges due. Daily costs reported also dropped because use of GPS ankle monitors result in payments that were nearly 3 times higher per participant than use of SmartLINK.

This raises a number of questions. Who is minding the store? Is ICE not checking BI's reports? How far back was this or other misreporting going on? And today, can the public trust the accuracy of current reports? The public and oversight bodies need full transparency on what is currently occurring, what took place in the past, and why no one at ICE apparently noticed what was going on.

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