For months, Trump administration officials have resisted attempts to ensure Immigration Customs and Enforcement agents can be held accountable for their actions in the field — including prohibiting agents from wearing masks or refusing to identify themselves. The administration argues these basic attempts to ensure armed agents of the state are abiding by any rules at all would lead to “doxxing” and potentially put agents’ lives in danger.
Now Apple appears to have bought into the administration’s kind of thinking, but with a twist. The technology giant removed an app called DeICER from its App Store this month for violating guidelines against “objectionable content.” (The app’s removal was first reported by Migrant Insider.) Developed by professor and author Rafael Concepcion, DeICER is intended to help communities log immigration law enforcement activity, but, Concepcion wrote to Apple, it is “not a law enforcement tracker.”
According to an email reviewed by MSNBC, Apple’s App Review Board deemed DeICER in violation of one of the safety guidelines for its App Store, specifically one that prohibits “references or commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other target groups, particularly if the app is likely to humiliate, intimidate, or harm a targeted individual or group.” (Italics mine)
This sure reads as though Apple sees ICE agents as a protected group, at risk for harassment and discrimination. (Apple did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
The idea that law enforcement officials should be considered a protected, at-risk class has been popular on the right since the first Trump administration.
In a letter to Apple requesting an appeal of its decision, Concepcion noted that “the act of photographing or recording law enforcement performing their duties in public is constitutionally protected speech under established case law.” DeICER’s “core function,” Concepcion wrote, “is to educate and empower communities—particularly immigrants—through lawful civic engagement and multilingual rights education. The app offers users the ability to document public events safely, read educational rights cards, and access resources explaining their legal rights during encounters with authorities. Reports are user-initiated, delayed, and generalized, ensuring no real-time tracking or targeting of law enforcement officers.”
There’s no reason to believe Apple was pressured by the government into this decision, but the idea that law enforcement officials should be considered a protected, at-risk class has been popular on the right since the first Trump administration. Numerous states and localities passed so-called Blue Lives Matter laws that in some cases even added hate crime enhancements for suspects accused of hurting police officers’ feelings.
The expansive approach to treating law enforcement members as a protected class is especially curious given President Donald Trump and his supporters’ consistent opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion and other identity-based protections for marginalized groups.
In his second term, Trump has issued numerous executive orders that not only banned DEI in government agencies, but also canceled contracts with universities and private organizations because of their DEI policies and even repealed some equal opportunity-in-the-workplace regulations and other discrimination prohibitions that dated to the 1960s — long before what MAGA sees as the scourge of wokeness that took hold in recent years.
Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought even paused $18 billion in funds for New York City infrastructure projects “to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.” That’s how much MAGA claims to hate identity politics, wokeness, political correctness, et al. — it will claw back congressionally approved funds to build rail tunnels, lest those infrastructure projects catch woke cooties.
But when it comes to law enforcement, Trump wants to have it both ways.
In a particularly unhinged executive order from May titled “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens,” the president paints law enforcement as a besieged group “demonized” by local leaders who apply “political handcuffs that make aggressively enforcing the law impossible.” In the very same paragraph, Trump adds, “My Administration will work to ensure that law enforcement officers across America focus on ending crime, not pursuing harmful, illegal race- and sex-based ‘equity’ policies.”
In the MAGA mind, there is little to no reason for legal protections against discrimination for members of any group — except when they are police. And, as previously noted, while there’s no reason to believe Apple shares MAGA’s political motivations, it essentially just ratified the view of law enforcement officers as a protected class.
