Apple has removed ICEBlock, an app that allowed users to monitor and report the location of immigration enforcement officers, from the App Store.
“We created the App Store to be a safe and trusted place to discover apps,” Apple said in a statement to Business Insider. “Based on information we’ve received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it and similar apps from the App Store.”
The app developer did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Fox News reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi requested that Apple remove ICEBlock.
“We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store — and Apple did so,” Fox News reported Bondi said. “ICEBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs, and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed. This Department of Justice will continue making every effort to protect our brave federal law enforcement officers, who risk their lives every day to keep Americans safe.”
The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
President Donald Trump’s administration has taken a firm stance against law enforcement tracking apps such as ICEBlock. Politico reported in July that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had suggested prosecuting CNN for publishing a report about the app.
Related stories
Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know
Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know
Controversy surrounding similar apps has increased in recent weeks following a deadly shooting on September 24 at a Dallas ICE facility that left two men — detainees at the facility — dead, and a third injured.
A statement from the Department of Homeland Security said a sniper on a nearby rooftop fired indiscriminately at the ICE building, including at a van where the victims were shot.
This would not be the first time Apple has removed apps from the App Store after government pressure.
In 2019, Apple removed HKmap.live, an app used by protesters in Hong Kong to track the location of police officers in the city. Apple CEO Tim Cook told employees in an email obtained by The New York Times that the app was “being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence and to victimize individuals and property where no police are present.”
Then, in 2021, Apple removed Navalny, an app named after the now-deceased Russian dissident Alexey Navalny. Opposition supporters had created the voting app to help coordinate protest voting during Russia’s elections. Russia’s government said the app was illegal and ordered Apple and Google to remove the app from their stores.
Last year, Apple removed messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram from its App Store in China after local authorities ordered them to do so. A spokesperson for Apple told The Wall Street Journal that the company is “obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree.”
Pressure from the Trump administration
Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, told Business Insider that since Apple is a private company, it has its own prerogative over what apps can be made available on its App Store, but the fact that the company appeared to be responding to government pressure has “worrisome implications.”
“There could be extreme levels of jawboning of Apple to remove apps that the Trump administration doesn’t want available,” Caraballo said. “They could threaten to implement massive tariffs against Apple if they don’t remove certain apps from the App Store, or pressure them in other ways.”
Caraballo cited Elon Musk’s recent criticisms of BlueSky — a prominent left-wing social media app — as evidence that people close to the Trump administration could pressure Apple to remove apps that contain content the government finds objectionable.
Musk, on September 14, replied “True,” to a post on X that said the right-wing social media app Parler had been removed from Apple’s App store “for about 0.1% of the extremist vitriol which now pervades BlueSky and Reddit.”
“So this is not a hypothetical,” Caraballo said. “I think the worrisome aspect here is that one of the things that the administration has been really good at is targeting institutions that themselves won’t push back or fight, and then the people who are actually directly affected are kind of boxed out of a direct legal challenge.”
Caraballo said that the creator of the ICEBlock app would have a hard time filing a First Amendment lawsuit against the government for pressuring Apple to remove the app, because Apple did so voluntarily.
“If they sued the federal government over it, the federal government could just say, ‘Well, we didn’t take it down — that was Apple — and we didn’t actually require them to take it down, we just told them to,'” Caraballo said. “And so that becomes almost like the Spider-Man pointing meme, where no one is really responsible or the decision falls onto Apple, and Apple is considered a private actor.”
