For the second time in one week, Apple has removed an app from its App Store that was designed to track abuses by Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
Last week, Apple removed ICEBlock, an app designed to allow users to report nearby ICE activity in their neighborhoods. The app, which Trump administration officials had frequently criticized, sought to keep immigrants abreast of federal law enforcement’s presence in their communities.
“We just received a message from Apple’s App Review that #ICEBlock has been removed from the App Store due to ‘objectionable content’,” ICEBlock wrote, in a post on Bluesky last week. “The only thing we can imagine is this is due to pressure from the Trump Admin. We have responded and we’ll fight this! #resist.”
Now, yet another ICE-related app has been banned. The app in question, called Eyes Up, allows users to upload videos of ICE officers engaging in abusive behavior. The app’s website provides a geographical map of where the alleged abuses took place, along with timestamped videos that provide evidence of the behavior. The goal is to preserve digital evidence that could be used later in legal cases against the government.
According to Eyes Up’s developer, the app was kicked off the App Store on October 3rd—the day after ICEBlock reported its own expulsion. That developer expressed their frustration to 404’s journalist, Joseph Cox, about the app’s expulsion:
“Our goal is government accountability, we aren’t even doing real-time tracking,” the administrator of Eyes Up, who said their name was Mark, told 404 Media. Mark asked 404 Media to only use his first name to protect him from retaliation. “I think the [Trump] admin is just embarrassed by how many incriminating videos we have.”
“Mark” added that he is careful to curate the material to ensure that it belongs in the app’s video repository:
“I personally look at each submission to ensure that it’s relevant, accurately described to the best I can tell, and appropriate to post. I actually look at the user submitted location and usually cross-reference with [Google] Street View to verify. We have an entire private app just for moderation of the submissions,” Mark said.
Gizmodo reached out to Apple for more information about the ban. It’s unclear if and how the app may have violated the company’s terms of service. 404 notes that Apple did not respond to its request for comment.
Apple, like many other tech firms, has sucked up to the White House since Trump took office. Earlier this year, CEO Tim Cook donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Meanwhile, at a White House AI summit in September, Cook rambled on sycophantically about what a great job the president was doing. As such, it would obviously be easy to read Apple’s recent expulsion of the two ICE-related apps as a different kind of sucking up, but, of course, we have limited information about it.
