Growing up in New York City, “snitches get stitches” was a phrase I heard often, from playgrounds to movies, and in adult conversations I had no business being privy to. Snitching never had a positive connotation, understandably. But a highly scrutinized new app proves that sounding the horn to protect someone vulnerable is a historic form of protest — and it’s not going anywhere.
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ICEBlock is a crowdsourcing platform designed to inform and warn communities of the presence of ICE agents. The app functions as a defensive response to recently revved up ICE raids while also shedding light on the power of collective and strategic information sharing. For all those reasons, it’s making the Trump administration Big Mad.
Officially launched this past April, ICEBlock came under fire this week when White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and acting ICE Director Todd M. Lyons released an official statement critiquing a CNN story covering the app, with quotes from its founder Joshua Aaron. The statement refers to CNN’s coverage as an advertisement for an app “that basically paints a target on federal law enforcement officers’ backs.” It feels a little hypocritical to talk about ICE agents as targets to me, but OK.
Since the statement was released on Monday, ICEBlock reportedly rose to the top of Apple’s App Store and had over 95,000 users.
“Trump officials got a lesson in the Streisand effect—whereby attempts to suppress information only circulate it further—as their outrage over ICEBlock,” Robert McCoy wrote in The New Republic. And now the Trump administration, doing what they do, is threatening CNN with legal action.
While Kristi Noem and them might see this app as a form of snitching on law enforcement, it actually increases agents’ accountability. In many ways, chiming in on it can restore a sense of power to residents.
I know I’m not alone when I say Donald Trump’s second term has had me fighting off feelings of hopelessness on a daily basis. Every day, our social feeds are inundated with updates about new policy proposals that would hurt our well-being — whether they are cuts to gender-affirming care or the potential loss of social benefits to thousands of people who rely on them to get by. But for me, masked ICE agents hunting down students, mothers, fathers, and anyone they’ve deemed “illegal,” has been among the most disconcerting things to watch.
Crowdsourcing apps are a reminder that there’s great power to watching each other’s backs. Aaron cited his Jewish upbringing as a guiding light for the app. “I had the chance to meet Holocaust survivors and learn the history of what happened in Nazi Germany, and the parallels that we can draw between what’s happening right now in our country and Hitler’s rise to power are undeniable,” he said, in an interview with NBC News.
The truth is, it’s a grand American tradition to protect each other against what we deem immoral behavior from authority figures; it’s even more specifically Black American tradition as marked by the Black Panthers, and by enslaved people who used coded language to share pertinent information related to organizing escapes and other acts of resistance.
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And so, while the Trump administration bristles at people’s attempts to mobilize, the act of community care will continue to evolve along with technology that fuels it.
