Marlon Urrutia Diaz traveled thousands of miles with his wife and small children, crossing treacherous terrain and paying a cartel’s ransom to get from Honduras to the U.S.
When he crossed the border early last year at Calexico, California, and turned himself in, border agents learned why he’d come so far under such dangerous conditions: Members of the ruthless MS-13 gang had threatened his life, he said. He was briefly detained, then released, eventually finding work in Memphis as a maintenance technician at an apartment complex as his plea for asylum worked its way through the U.S. justice system.
But Urrutia Diaz, 34, who has no criminal record, saw his fortunes suddenly sour last winter when he was re-arrested during a routine immigration check-in. Authorities contend he failed to comply with conditions of his supervised release — allegations he denies. Urrutia Diaz and his family soon found themselves on separate airplanes back to Honduras after a judge ordered him to be removed from the U.S. and his wife reluctantly signed voluntary departure papers.
An examination by the Institute for Public Service Reporting found Urrutia Diaz is one of a number of previously detained immigrants who are suddenly getting arrested and fast-tracked for deportation during routine visits to the local Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) office, even as their immigration or asylum cases remain active before judges.
Like Urrutia Diaz, many of these immigrants are told they’re under arrest for failing to follow check-in procedures on a smartphone app called BI SmartLINK that uses GPS and facial recognition software to track their whereabouts. Arrested immigrants interviewed by The Institute hotly contest these claims.
Some say the app is glitchy and often malfunctions. Others contend that ISAP case managers fabricate evidence of noncompliance. Still others say ISAP supervisors make last-minute changes to appointment times for in-person visits, making it impossible to show up on time, leading to possible arrest.
Sorting out the conflicting accounts between government agents and arrested immigrants can be extraordinarily difficult. But dozens of interviews and a review of hundreds of pages of court records make this much clear:
• The Memphis ISAP arrests are part of a nationwide rash of arrests of immigrants during routine check-ins. Critics say the Trump administration is using in-person check-ins as a “trap’’ to boost arrests and help meet President Trump’s goal of deporting a million immigrants a year.
• In its push to re-arrest previously detained immigrants, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has committed a slew of civil rights abuses. The Institute identified 12 separate rulings by federal judges in Memphis since January that ordered the release of ISAP arrestees on grounds they had been denied bond hearings in violation of their constitutional rights.
• Critics say the re-arrests are fracturing families, disrupting income streams of breadwinners, and harming the local economy. “It is a disaster, not just economically, but emotionally. And I tell you, the emotional damage is worse,” said community activist Nena Garza.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not respond to several questions posed to it in emails from The Institute. Those questions included a request for data on the number of arrests made during routine check-ins and a request for comment on critics’ claims that check-ins are being used as a “deportation trap.” Other questions involved the reliability of the BI SmartLINK app.
A DHS spokesperson at one point asked for names and dates of birth of the arrestees referenced in this story. When a reporter replied that she could not share those names because the arrestees asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, the spokesperson responded, “When the media refuses to give names, it makes it impossible to provide details on specific cases or even verify any of this even happened or that the people even exist. If you can’t do your job, we can’t do ours.”
The Institute eventually gave DHS the name of one arrestee, Urrutia Diaz, who had nothing to lose because he’d already been deported. DHS, in turn, said Urrutia Diaz was arrested after he missed multiple check-ins, but it did not respond to a request for records documenting Urrutia Diaz’s noncompliance.
V holds her infant in her apartment. (Photo: Micaela Watts)
A husband disappears
Crying, shaking, and in the third trimester of her second pregnancy, the young woman stood outside a Memphis ICE office in the chill of a gray February morning.
The woman, 33, who said she feared retaliation and asked to be named only by her first initial, “V,” is an immigrant from South America. Earlier that morning, her husband — an asylum-seeker like her — showed up for his monthly in-person check-in at the ISAP office near Memphis International Airport.
It should have been a routine visit involving questions about his whereabouts and day-to-day routines. Instead, agents pulled his arms behind his back, bound his wrists with a zip tie, and marched him out of the back of the office along with five others.
Placed in an unmarked vehicle, he and the others were taken to a nearby ICE office where arrestees are processed before being shipped to a detention center. That’s when V went looking for her husband.
She and a friend stood for nearly a half hour outside the ICE processing office before a plainclothes officer came out and handed V the keys to her husband’s car. V needed to know more. What about her husband’s cellphone? Wallet? Where were they taking him? “He told us that if we kept insisting, he would call an immigration agent on us,’’ V later said. So, she and her friend left. She picked up her husband’s car from the ISAP office and went home.
Later that night, using a location tracking app on her phone, V found out her husband was at the West Tennessee Detention Facility in Mason, Tennessee, some 40 miles northeast of Memphis.
Panicked, V began experiencing early contractions that night. She was eight months pregnant. V was taken to Baptist Hospital where the medical staff tried to help her relax. V was at risk of needing an emergency C-section, a doctor told her.
“I wanted to calm down for my son, because I know that he feels everything that I am going through, but it’s not easy,’’ V said. She remained in observation overnight and was released the next day.
Two days after her husband’s arrest, V finally spoke to him by phone. It was then she found out that he was arrested for allegedly failing to comply with ISAP procedures — a claim that he adamantly denied during a later phone interview with a reporter from the detention center.
Reports of increased arrests during routine check-ins at the Memphis ISAP office began spreading through Memphis’ Hispanic community at the beginning of the new Trump administration, said Nena Garza, a community activist who stays abreast of developments involving the immigration crackdown.
Garza said she understands ISAP participants are getting last-minute calls or texts to change appointment times or schedule last-minute check-ins, making it difficult for immigrants to show up on time for appointments. “The lucky ones come out with an ankle monitor, but others are arrested that same day,” said Garza, whose phone consistently buzzes with calls from immigrants in need.
(above) An arrest at ISAP; (below) A young girl is led out of the ISAP office in mid-March. (Photos:) Micaela Watts
App’s reliability questioned
Over a three-week period last winter, a team of reporters from The Institute watched as an assortment of people, including children, were escorted from ISAP offices by federal agents and transported to the nearby ICE field office where arrested immigrants are processed before being shipped off to detention centers.
In interviews with 20 of the arrested immigrants, or their family members, The Institute found that 16 of the arrestees said they were told they had failed to comply with terms of their supervised release. Three immigrants said they weren’t given a reason for their arrest. The reason was unclear in one case.
Seven arrestees interviewed said they were told they had failed to submit timely check-ins on the BI SmartLINK monitoring app that case managers had placed on their cellphones as part of ICE’s Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program. When a person is placed in the program, ISAP employees download an app onto the participant’s phone which helps them navigate the program, conduct weekly virtual check-ins, communicate with office staff, and keep track of upcoming appointments or changes.
In six of those cases, the arrestees said they had, in fact, either complied with app check-ins or had attempted to do so but were blocked by technical impediments. In the other case, a Guatemalan man — who signed his voluntary departure while at the Mason detention facility — said he was arrested for “submitting his picture 30 seconds late,” a claim he denies.
Verifying those claims is difficult, in part, because agents often seize the phones of arrestees and then lock them out of the app after their phones are returned.
Court records show one immigrant contends he was falsely accused of failing to show for a scheduled app-based video conference with a supervisor and then was denied access to evidence that could have proved him right.
“ICE failed to place the scheduled ATD video call, ignored Petitioner’s written message confirming his availability, and then locked Petitioner out of the ATD application upon arrest, preventing him from accessing the very evidence that would have exonerated him,’’ attorney Ralph K. Noyes wrote in a pleading filed in April in U.S. District Court in Memphis on behalf of the immigrant, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation.
The woman identified as V said she had a similar experience. She said she once snapped the obligatory selfie and submitted it through the app right away. However, she received a notification saying her submission was 30 minutes late.
“I immediately opened the application and sent the picture,” V said in Spanish. “… It is not fair that [the app] says that the picture was half an hour late when that was not the case.”
The ISAP SmartLINK cellphone app — introduced during the first Trump administration — is manufactured and managed by BI Inc., a community corrections subsidiary of The GEO Group Inc., a federal contractor that has received millions in payments for services that support President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
“BI SmartLINK® provides a secure platform for real-time communication between officers and clients,” BI Inc. says of the app on its website. “This practical and affordable mobile monitoring app enables agencies to securely monitor, collect data, and automate administrative work, while enhancing client compliance and accountability.”
The GEO Group did not respond to emails from The Institute seeking comment.
Yet critics contend the app is often glitchy and interferes with check-in processes. ICE rolled out the BI SmartLINK app in 2016 despite “failing accuracy rates,” according to a “fact sheet” published by Just Futures Law and two other criminal justice reform organizations. The fact sheet alleges that records obtained from ICE through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show that 56 percent of facial recognition check-ins failed during a pilot test of the app involving 12,000 check-ins. But, as the fact sheet acknowledges, ICE now maintains that independent testing has found a 98.5 facial matching accuracy rate involving 12 million images.
Civil rights violations
Among the 20 re-arrested immigrants contacted by The Institute, 18 filed habeas corpus petitions in U.S. District Court in Memphis, claiming the government had violated their constitutional rights by denying them bond hearings.
Judges agreed in 12 of those cases, ordering officials to release the immigrants from custody. Five of the petitions were denied. One of the cases remains unresolved.
In ordering the detainees’ release, judges have ruled that their detention without a bond hearing violates the Fifth Amendment, which states that no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” In mid-March, a federal appeals court made a similar ruling, calling ICE’s detention of immigrants without a bond hearing unconstitutional.
The government’s decision to deny the arrestees bond hearings stems from a July 2025 policy change by the Trump administration designed to streamline deportations. Under the change, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security now considers anyone who entered the country unlawfully, regardless of how long they’ve been here, as “arriving aliens” who aren’t entitled to bond.
The new policy was a radical change from past practice.
Immigration attorney Andrew Rankin said that dating back to the administration of President Ronald Reagan, “the position of the government has been even if you enter unlawfully to the United States, you are eligible to request a bond if you are detained …
“They are essentially, in my opinion, changing the tense of the verb from what it says, present, to has ever arrived or has arrived. They’ve changed the tense and therefore the scope of the statute,” Rankin said.
Rankin has a theory as to why this policy change was implemented: “This was just one of [White House advisor] Stephen Miller’s anti-immigrant folks trying to figure out how to lock up more people. That’s all this was.”
Birthday decor and a line of toys in V’s apartment (Photos: Erika Konig and Micaela Watts)
Putting the pieces back together
Although more than half of the arrestees identified by The Institute are now reunited with their families following favorable habeas corpus petitions granting their release, they face a host of new challenges.
With the abrupt removal of a wage-earner, life unraveled for families The Institute spoke with. Some families fell behind on their rent and were given eviction notices. Others were kicked out of their rental homes without proper notice. Vehicles were repossessed due to a failure to make payments.
Some lost family members while in detention.
Others, like V’s husband, missed the birth of a child. His plans of recording his son’s birth and bringing pancakes and hot coffee to his newly postpartum wife never materialized.
The hardest part, he said, was to be apart from his “osita” [little bear], a nickname he gave his 7-year-old daughter. At night while in detention, he clung to a body pillow he fashioned out of extra blankets and thought of his little girl.
“It was really hard for me. I had to do that to pretend that my daughter was there. I did that and I would hug the pillow and I would cry,” he said.
The father said he worries about the psychological trauma his daughter has suffered at such a young age: “She can’t even see a police officer getting close to me because she thinks they are going to arrest me.”
His detention was a major financial and emotional setback for the family, but they are happy to reunite once again. Their future is still uncertain as they wait for their asylum case to unfold.
“We are emerging once again. Emerging with hope even though we don’t know what will happen tomorrow,” the father said.
Erika Konig is a first-generation college student and first-generation immigrant from Mexico. She is currently a graduate student in the UofM’s Open-Source Investigative Reporting program. Konig’s reporting on immigration has earned local and national recognition.
Micaela A. Watts covers criminal justice and environmental issues for the Institute for Public Service Reporting. She has worked as a journalist in Memphis since 2015. She previously reported for the Memphis Flyer, Chalkbeat Tennessee and MLK50: Justice through Journalism.
