Opposing ICE Might Save the Country. It Could Also Ruin Your Life.

Brendan I. Koerner’s dramatic profile of Rafael Concepcion—creator of DEICER, an app that enables its users to “report ICE locations and access resources”—explores the considerable costs of hypervigilance. Concepcion, a child of immigrants and a former teaching professor at Syracuse University, has spent much of the past year developing apps to help safeguard immigrants from sweeping immigration raids. In that time, he also lost his job, racked up a range of tech costs, and suffered through hacks and harassment, all stressors on his mental health. “He doesn’t have a moderate switch,” one source tells Koerner about Concepcion. “It’s either all in or all out.”

As Concepcion and I ate in the fluorescent-lit dining room, half a dozen men in high-visibility vests came to grab lunch. Concepcion introduced himself and learned that they were undocumented Brazilians who’d been doing road repair jobs around the Northeast. He then showed them how to add a shortcut for the DEICER web app to their phones’ home screens. The Brazilians seemed courteous but wary of whether DEICER could do them much good.