Lawmaker rejects Apple excuse for banning ICE-tracking apps as unconstitutional.
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Apple continues to face backlash for removing ICE-tracking apps like ICEBlock from the App Store, a drastic step that seemed to be triggered by Trump administration claims that the apps endangered officers.
According to US Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Apple has no evidence to support claims that apps raised safety concerns. Instead, the lawmaker accused Apple of using immigrant deaths with no connection to the apps to justify censoring Americans who have the right to record ICE activity.
It appears that Apple is “working with the government to violate its customers’ First Amendment rights to record and report on the activities of their own government,” Raskin said in a letter to Apple sent Monday, CNN reported.
Raskin had been hounding Apple for answers for months. In July, Apple finally explained to Raskin that ICEBlock was removed, along with other apps, after a fatal shooting left two detainees dead at a Dallas ICE office, CNN reported.
As an earlier CNN report explained, the shooter in that case, Joshua Jahn, fired bullets indiscriminately into the ICE facility before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot. Jahn left notes saying that he “hoped his actions would give ICE agents real terror of being gunned down.”
At that time, the US attorney for the Northern District of Texas, Nancy Larson, highlighted the “tragic irony” that it was a detainee who was killed during the attacks, CNN’s report said. But the Department of Homeland Security, along with FBI director Kash Patel, has since claimed that the incident showed agents were being targeted. DHS also frequently cites an internal October 2025 statistic claiming that ICE officers face an 8,000 percent increase in death threats. The agency will not release data to let independent parties verify that claim.
Additionally, Patel has said that the Texas shooter “searched for apps that tracked ICE agents’ locations.” But Raskin pushed back on that claim, too, telling Apple that there is “no evidence” that the shooter used ICE-tracking apps. And even if he did, “he did not need a tracking app to locate the fixed position of a government building” and “is reported to have found the address using an app that comes standard on Apple devices,” Raskin’s letter said.
“There appears to be no direct connection between the Dallas incident and the apps you removed,” Raskin said.
Apple pressured to share DHS communications
To ensure that no Americans’ core speech rights are violated by removals unconstitutionally ordered by the government, Raskin has asked Apple to “send a full list of the apps it removed following concerns from the Justice Department” so that it will finally be possible to “conduct an independent review of those removal decisions.”
Federal officials have insisted that Apple acted on its own.
However, in a lawsuit accusing the Trump administration officials of censoring watchdogs, ICEBlock creator Joshua Aaron told the court that officials publicly bragged about getting the app removed. And in Apple’s July letter to Raskin—which was signed by Timothy Powderly, Apple’s senior director of government affairs—the iPhone maker seemed to confirm this. Powderly specifically cited agency reports of a “significant increase in ICE activity and threats against ICE” as triggering the follow-up review of ICE-tracking apps.
Apple claimed it was acting to protect both officers and detainees, ultimately deciding that sharing “precise location information about ICE officers (and, as a result, other individuals who may be in proximity to ICE agents, such as protestors or detainees)” provides “a potential roadmap for targeted violence and creating a significant risk of harm.”
The company “does not take decisions about removing apps from the App Store lightly, but acts when it must—especially when there are serious concerns that an app is creating safety risks,” Powderly said.
Raskin remains dubious that records will show the apps posed any risks. On Bluesky, Aaron did not comment directly on CNN’s report, but he did boost an ICEBlock post that thanked Raskin for continuing to press Apple to explain the removals.
“Apple’s sticking to their story even though everyone can see this was jawboning plain as day,” ICEBlock’s post said.
Trump admin denies app removals are retaliation
The Trump administration has asked the court to dismiss Aaron’s lawsuit, claiming that Apple independently chose to moderate that content, despite comments from agency officials suggesting otherwise.
It doesn’t matter that former officials like Pam Bondi publicly took credit for removing ICEBlock from the App Store, boasting that she made the “demand” and “Apple did so.” Those comments were merely officials expressing opinions about Apple’s promotion of supposedly dangerous apps, they argued. They’re hoping the court will agree that Aaron has not uncovered evidence of communications that can be “reasonably understood to convey a threat of adverse government action” against Apple “if Apple chose not to remove ICEBlock from the App Store.”
But in an August ruling, the Second Circuit recently upheld that courts broadly recognize “a First Amendment right to record law enforcement activity in public,” Aaron argued in a recent filing that could influence how the case is decided at this stage. In his opposition to the government’s motion to dismiss, Aaron maintained that the record showed that the government was acting to censor Americans.
As he argued:
The then-Attorney General told the nation she demanded removal of the app, Apple reversed a decision it previously reached after a thorough five-week legal review citing only “information provided to Apple by law enforcement,” and the then-Attorney General characterized Apple’s response as “compliance.”
If the case proceeds, which Aaron expects it will, discovery would likely reveal the actual communications between government officials and Apple leadership, which so far have remained hidden. Only then can a court sufficiently determine if “a threat of adverse government action” triggered app removals, Aaron argued.
Raskin told Apple that he thinks the removal decisions won’t fly under the First Amendment.
“Monitoring the actions of federal immigration authorities who have been deployed to (users’) neighborhoods… is a core First Amendment right and not a crime,” Raskin said.
