ICE Tracking App Case: Permanent Bar on DOJ, DHS Pressure

The Justice and Homeland Security departments agreed to a permanent court order barring them from pressuring Apple and Facebook over an ICE tracking app and a Chicago-area sightings group, ending a First Amendment suit without any admission of wrongdoing.

The federal government has accepted a permanent injunction that bars the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security from pressuring Apple to keep an ICE tracking app called Eyes Up off its App Store, or pressuring Facebook to keep a group called “ICE Sightings – Chicagoland” offline. U.S. District Judge Jorge L. Alonso of the Northern District of Illinois entered the order on Nov. 13, 2026, at the joint request of both sides, turning an April preliminary injunction into a final one and dismissing the case with prejudice. The outcome closes Rosado v. Blanche, the suit brought in February by the group’s creator, Kassandra Rosado, and Kreisau Group LLC, the company behind the app, with lawyers from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

The order is narrow in reach but broad in wording. Officials, employees and anyone acting on their behalf may take “no actions, formal or informal,” to demand or pressure the two companies to suppress the group or the app, or to threaten them with sanctions for restoring them. Within seven days, government lawyers must notify DOJ and DHS leadership, email Meta and Apple, including every person previously contacted about the group or about removing ICE-monitoring apps, and give FIRE proof that they did so.

How the case got here

The dispute began in October 2025, when Facebook disabled the Chicago group and Apple pulled Eyes Up. In his April 17 opinion granting the preliminary injunction, Judge Alonso pointed to public statements by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, including her Oct. 2, 2025 remark on Fox News that the department had reached out to Apple “demanding” removal of a different app, ICEBlock, and later posts by Bondi and then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem crediting DOJ outreach for Facebook’s action. He also noted that Apple had reviewed and approved Eyes Up in August 2025, and that Facebook had removed only five posts or comments from the group before shutting it down.

The legal test came from the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in National Rifle Association v. Vullo, which held that the government violates the First Amendment when it coerces a private company to punish or suppress speech on its behalf. Judge Alonso drew the line the Seventh Circuit drew in a 2015 case over credit card companies and Backpage.com: officials may try to persuade, but they may not coerce. Statements by Bondi and Noem promising to prosecute people who “dox” agents were not direct threats, he wrote, but could be read as intimations of one. He found the plaintiffs likely to win. Noem had framed the issue as agent safety, saying platforms “must be PROACTIVE in stopping the doxxing” of officers. DOJ and DHS did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment on the settlement.

What the settlement does and does not settle

The joint motion, signed by U.S. Attorney Andrew S. Boutros’s office on Nov. 12, contains no admission of liability, and the final order makes no new findings. That matters. A preliminary injunction rests on a judge’s view of who is likely to win; no court has ruled on the merits, and there will be no appeal to the Seventh Circuit that could have produced binding precedent either way. For the government, a consent judgment covering two platforms carries less risk than an appellate opinion on how far officials may go in leaning on tech companies about immigration enforcement content.

The protection also runs only to these plaintiffs. The order says nothing about ICEBlock or other ICE-related apps pulled from the App Store in 2025, and it does not stop Apple or Meta from taking down content under their own rules. Its practical force lies in the notice requirement: the company employees who heard from the government before will now hear, in writing, that the requests are off the table. Whether Facebook restores the group or Apple reinstates the app remains the companies’ own decision.

The case is one of several testing how ICE’s expanded interior enforcement intersects with public scrutiny, alongside fights over crowd-control tactics at ICE facilities in Portland, a watchdog review of ICE body camera compliance, the prosecution of protesters in the Broadview Six case outside Chicago, and congressional efforts to subpoena ICE records. The likely next test is whether other app developers or group administrators bring their own suits using Judge Alonso’s April opinion as a road map, since it cleared the standing hurdle that defeated the platform-pressure claims in Murthy v. Missouri.

This article is for general information and is not legal advice.

Sources

Vasanth Vaidyanathan, Esq.

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Vasanth Vaidyanathan is an immigration attorney with over 20 years of experience focused exclusively on U.S. immigration and nationality law. He holds an LL.M. from California Western School of Law, San Diego and advises individuals and businesses on employment and family-based immigration matters, including H-1B, PERM, EB categories, and adjustment of status. He has also been a featured speaker at immigration seminars across the U.S. To reach Vasanth visit: https://www.vnathan.com/

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