The Professor Who Built an App to Fight ICE—And What Happened When Apple Took It Down
Just one week into Donald Trump’s second presidential term, Rafael Concepcion stumbled across a Facebook post that would completely upend his life. The post was written by Maria Hernandez, owner of a beloved Mexican grocery store that’s a local staple for the Latino community spread across New York’s Finger Lakes region. Hernandez shared that several of her most loyal regulars had already gone into hiding to avoid Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). With her sales crashing, she extended an offer: she would deliver free groceries to anyone too frightened of deportation raids to step outside their home.
Concepcion, a second-generation immigrant and professor at nearby Syracuse University, was struck by Hernandez’s act of community care. He got in his car and made the 45-minute drive to her shop to pay his respects and support her business. At 51, Concepcion is a large, outgoing man with neatly slicked-back hair; on that visit, he wore a simple black V-neck tee and blue jeans as he browsed aisles stacked high with pan dulce, fresh tomatillos, and religious prayer candles. Near a refrigerated display case, he noticed an African American customer studying packages of chorizo. The customer assumed Concepcion worked at the store, and told him: “I don’t recognize any of these products, but I saw the post on Facebook and wanted to come in to support this place.”
That trip to Hernandez’s store stirred something long-buried in Concepcion: a quiet moral unrest that slowly grew into an all-consuming mission to block ICE’s deportation work. In early February 2025, he wrote an op-ed for the Syracuse Post-Standard about his experience at the market—just a short drive from Harriet Tubman’s longtime home. “I plan to help this community in any way I can, and I hope you will join me,” he wrote. “History expects us to do the right thing.” The column drew hundreds of angry comments, with many readers writing things like “Just follow the law—you people make me sick.” That backlash convinced Concepcion that polite opinion pieces were not enough. Since Trump’s new inauguration, ICE had already tripled its daily arrests, pushing the daily total past 600. Soft activism would not move the needle.
Before he started teaching multimedia storytelling at Syracuse’s top-ranked Newhouse School of Public Communications, Concepcion spent 20 years working on the fringes of the tech industry. So he decided to build a mobile app to teach immigrants how to claim their constitutional rights when stopped by ICE agents.
Concepcion often describes himself as having “the worst case of ADD you’ve ever seen,” but when he started this project, he became completely hyperfixated on it. (The black V-neck and jeans he wore to Hernandez’s store are his go-to uniform: he owns 30 identical shirts and 30 identical pairs of pants to avoid decision paralysis when getting dressed.) He relied heavily on AI tools like Cursor and ElevenLabs to speed up development. Fueled by massive amounts of caffeine—“I drink about 14 cups of coffee a day,” he told me—Concepcion did most of his late-night coding sitting in his electric F-150 pickup parked outside a local Home Depot, between midnight and dawn. He chose that spot to feel closer to the day laborers he hoped the app would serve, and he looped the entire Hamilton soundtrack on repeat while he worked.
By April, ICE was ramping up enforcement raids from Maine to California. That’s when Concepcion got a panicked message from a chef at one of his favorite local Latin restaurants. The chef’s adult son—who I’ll refer to as Gabriel to protect his privacy—was driving to a construction job in nearby Oswego when Border Patrol agents pulled him over. Gabriel, a Mexican native with a pending asylum claim, handed over his valid immigration paperwork, but agents refused to stand down. He was taken into custody and held at an overcrowded ICE detention facility in Batavia, New York, located between Buffalo and Rochester. The distraught chef, who all the restaurant regulars know calls Concepcion “El Profe,” reached out asking for help to get his son released.
Concepcion has always jumped at the chance to help people targeted by an unfair immigration system, so he dropped everything to fight for Gabriel. He found an attorney willing to take the case for a $4,000 fee, then wrote a character reference for the judge on Syracuse University letterhead. After several anxious weeks, Gabriel was released on $10,000 bail—a rare outcome in 2025, when immigration bail releases dropped 87% year over year. Concepcion volunteered to drive the two hours to the detention center to pick him up.
The drive back to Syracuse was uncomfortably quiet. As Concepcion looked at the exhausted, defeated young man sitting next to him, he began to regret the mild, educational focus of the app he’d been building. What good was teaching immigrants their rights if federal agents routinely ignored those rights just to hit arrest quotas? Concepcion realized he needed to build a different kind of tool—one that could “stop these people from falling off the map, stop them from disappearing without a trace.”
He completely overhauled the app to give it a far more aggressive purpose. The new version let any user report ICE activity by dropping a pin on a shared map. Any user within close range of the pin would get an immediate push notification with detailed information—including photos—of where agents were and what vehicles they were using. Users could use that information to organize spontaneous protests to block raids, or to flee to safety. He named the app DEICER.
When it came time to submit DEICER to Apple’s App Store, Concepcion grew anxious. He worried the federal government would pressure Apple to hand over a list of every user who’d downloaded the app. But he decided to move forward anyway. “ICE is hunting millions of people,” he said in a promotional video for DEICER’s official launch on July 28. “What if millions of people started hunting ICE?”
DEICER joined a small but growing group of crowdsourced mapping tools that popped up in response to the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, including ICEBlock and the Stop ICE text alert network. These tools were built to counter ICE’s massive technological advantage over the loose network of immigrant rights activists. With a $77 billion annual budget, ICE has built an arsenal of Palantir-powered surveillance tools that can pinpoint targets anywhere. The resistance, by contrast, relies entirely on the ingenuity of independent creators like Concepcion. Since launching DEICER, he’s already clashed with internet trolls, hackers, right-wing media conglomerates, and the world’s second most valuable company: Apple.
Concepcion’s Path to Activism
Concepcion grew up in the South Bronx in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the neighborhood was synonymous with urban decay. His Puerto Rican father worked as a janitor, and often scavenged for scrap copper to earn extra money so he could buy fresh loaves of bread for his seven children. His mother was an immigrant from Puebla, Mexico. A rotating stream of her “uncles” and “cousins” would crash at their small apartment while they looked for under-the-table work. Concepcion still remembers being surprised that men who’d worked as engineers in Mexico were grateful to take jobs washing dishes in New York.
A bright student, Concepcion left the Bronx to attend a state university in Plattsburgh, a small town on the icy shores of Lake Champlain, far from his hometown. He originally planned to become an English teacher, but his path shifted when he discovered the internet. He spent most of college experimenting with the text-based browser Lynx and the VAX operating system. After graduating, that early tech experience led him to a customer support role at IBM, then a job leading software training for a German e-commerce company, and eventually a long career writing popular guidebooks for Adobe Photoshop.
In 2018, Concepcion moved to Syracuse with his wife, an elementary school teacher, and their young daughter, to take a curriculum development job at Syracuse University. He also taught a storytelling class as an adjunct professor, which led to a full-time contract as an assistant teaching professor in 2022. It was his dream job: he got to be a role model for two groups of students in particular, those who share his Latino roots and those who struggle with mental health conditions. “I’m very open with my students,” he says. “I struggle with ADD, I struggle with depression, I’ve had mental health crises.”
Concepcion also grew to love Syracuse, a Rust Belt city of 146,000 best known for its heavy annual snowfall and high child poverty rate. He was inspired to see some of the city’s most run-down neighborhoods being revitalized by new arrivals from Syria, Burma, and South Sudan. Between 2000 and 2014, Syracuse’s foreign-born population grew by more than 42%. To bring that diverse community energy to campus, he served multiple terms as chair of the Newhouse School’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) committee. In 2023, he and his wife became foster parents, taking in a 14-year-old girl who had been living in a drug-ridden neighborhood on Syracuse’s South Side. One of 13 siblings, she had been using a closet as her bedroom before the couple took her in; Concepcion’s wife, a former ballerina, first met her while teaching a local dance class.
As Concepcion put the final touches on DEICER in early summer 2025, he got bad news from the university. Three weeks before the end of the semester, he says a dean told him that a full professorship they had previously discussed was no longer available. He could, however, apply for a back-office administrative role. The cut came as the university scrambled to comply with the U.S. Department of Education’s mandate that elite universities eliminate all DEI programs and practices.
Within days of DEICER launching on the App Store, it was downloaded more than 3,000 times, and Concepcion started getting hundreds of emailed death threats—so many that he started shopping for a bulletproof vest. Syracuse’s student newspaper published an op-ed calling DEICER a “revolutionary tool for immigrant communities” and reported Concepcion’s suspicion that he was being pushed out of the university because of his political activism. Shortly after that, Concepcion was told he was no longer being considered for the back-office role either. (A Syracuse spokesperson told me the university is “unable to comment on personnel matters” but that they “appreciate Rafael’s contributions to the Newhouse School and wish him the best in his future endeavors.”) For the first time in decades, Concepcion was unemployed. I first connected with him shortly after this setback, and we spoke in a series of long phone calls over the following months.
The Fight With Apple
On October 2, roughly two months after DEICER launched, the U.S. Department of Justice contacted Apple and demanded the company remove all apps that “put ICE agents at risk for doing their jobs.” The next day, Concepcion got an email from Apple explaining that DEICER— which by then had roughly 30,000 users—was being removed from the App Store. The company said the app’s “purpose is to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.” In effect, Apple ruled that ICE agents are a protected class, on par with racial and ethnic minorities, meaning the app violated App Store guidelines barring “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content” targeting groups. ICEBlock, another app that Attorney General Pam Bondi had labeled a target for criminal investigation, was removed from the store the same day for the same reason.
Apple’s surrender to the Justice Department showed how much the company’s priorities have shifted over the past decade. In 2015 and 2016, Apple fought a fierce legal battle against the federal government, which was demanding the company build a security backdoor into iPhones in the wake of ISIS-inspired terror attacks. Today, Apple seems to prioritize good relations with the Trump administration above all else—a pragmatic move, perhaps, given the company’s desire to avoid crippling tariffs and other political retaliation. (Apple did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)
Concepcion was far less willing to back down than the tech giant. To appeal the removal, he submitted a modified version of DEICER he thought would address Apple’s concerns. In the updated app, pins no longer include any specific information about individual ICE agents; instead, they simply alert users that they can gather at the marked location to “exercise your First Amendment right to constitutional assembly.” The change did nothing to win over Apple, which rejected his appeal on the exact same grounds as before.
As he figured out his next move for DEICER, Concepcion kept the core app available as a browser-based web app, and started spinning up new related projects. Whenever ICE launched a raid surge in a new city, he quickly built a hyper-local version of DEICER for that area. He built a custom web app for Chicago after ICE launched Operation Midway Blitz, then another for Portland, Oregon after Trump deployed hundreds of National Guard troops to both cities. “It almost feels like I’m just trying to dress DEICER up in a chicken suit to get people to use it,” he told me. “But I don’t care what it looks like as long as people actually use it.”
These one-off local versions rarely gained much traction, mostly because they didn’t have existing local community networks to promote them to the people who needed them most. That changed when Concepcion was hired to build a custom version for Siembra NC, a North Carolina-based immigrant rights group he’d connected with shortly after DEICER launched.
Siembra had been studying ICE monitoring tools since the spring, and the group had misgivings about many existing platforms. “Most of them are just rumor mills,” says Andrew Willis Garcés, Siembra’s senior strategist. “They give people the feeling they’re doing something, and it’s a way to channel anxiety, but they don’t actually help people learn to spot the patterns and tactics the administration is using. And that just creates a general sense of fear, which is exactly what Stephen Miller wants. He’d love to have a thousand random tools floating around where you can never tell what’s real and what’s not.”
Siembra liked DEICER’s design, so they hired Concepcion to build a North Carolina-specific version called OJO Obrero (“Look out, workers”), which added a layer of tip moderation. The plan was for Siembra volunteers to verify every user-submitted report before a pin went live on the map. That meant users couldn’t get real-time updates on ICE movements, eliminating one of the core features Concepcion built into the original DEICER. But Siembra argued that a cautious approach was necessary to build reliable data on ICE’s patterns—for example, what times of day agents patrol specific highways, and what types of vehicles they target most often.
OJO Obrero was still in beta testing on November 15, when Concepcion drove his foster daughter to her school’s winter choral recital. As he waited in the auditorium for the show to start, he scrolled through Instagram and froze when he saw a Reel from Siembra’s official account. Hours earlier, hundreds of federal agents had launched a massive raid surge across North Carolina, the first phase of an operation the Department of Homeland Security had codenamed Charlotte’s Web. Siembra’s representative told viewers the group was ready for the operation: “Siembra NC built a tool called OJO Obrero,” she said, “a website you can use to track confirmed sightings of ICE agents by location and time across the entire state.”
OJO Obrero was pushed live abruptly, even though Concepcion believed it was nowhere near ready to handle the flood of traffic that would come from a national news story. During testing, he’d averaged around 3,000 database requests a day to the platform that hosted the app’s mapping features. As news of Charlotte’s Web spread, requests spiked to an unmanageable 75 million, crashing the site and leaving Concepcion with an $8,000 usage bill he had to pay out of pocket.
But Concepcion quickly worked out the technical bugs and got OJO Obrero back online and stable. Siembra assigned 30 of their most tech-savvy volunteers to vet the flood of incoming tips. Within days, the group was able to share key patterns with the community, like the fact that ICE agents often pull over white work vans. “You could see day to day what patterns they were following the day before, so you could guess what today might look like,” Garcés says. “It really helped people plan to stay safe.”
But Concepcion took little joy in OJO Obrero’s success. He was increasingly disturbed by his social media feeds, which were flooded with videos of screaming families being dragged into unmarked SUVs. Like millions of other people following the immigration fight, he got stuck in what he calls “the algorithmic rage loop.” He started questioning whether his work could ever avoid feeding that toxic cycle.
On the Ground in Syracuse
After two months of talking over the phone, I drove up to Syracuse in December, arriving just as a dangerous nighttime snowstorm began to cover the city. The next morning, Concepcion took me to meet Gabriel and his father at the Latin restaurant where both now work. Gabriel, who looks young for his age, came out of the kitchen to show me the ankle monitor he’s required to wear, which he said is so scratchy it’s almost unbearable. His upbeat father insisted on serving me a huge plate of barbacoa. As he scooped the meat out of a steam tray under a sign that reads “Welcome to Our Home,” he told me in Spanish that just the day before, masked agents had arrested someone at the gas station across the street.
As Concepcion and I ate in the fluorescent-lit dining room, six men in high-visibility work vests came in for lunch. Concepcion introduced himself, and learned they were undocumented Brazilian workers doing road repair across the Northeast. He walked them through how to add a shortcut for the DEICER web app to their phones’ home screens. The men were polite, but they were skeptical that the app could actually help them.
Concepcion is used to that kind of skepticism. In the months since his fight with Apple, he’s come to believe that tools like DEICER are failing to reach the immigrant communities that need them most. Instead, he says, they’re mostly used by well-meaning activists who want to film ICE raids and share the videos with audiences that already oppose Trump’s immigration policies. Concepcion argues this content leaves viewers exhausted, pushing many to step back from a fight that algorithms frame as already lost. And immigrants keep disappearing, no matter how many cameras capture their arrests.
Concepcion’s solution is for community groups that have spent years building trust with immigrant communities—like Siembra—to promote tools like DEICER directly to their members
