The Biden administration is under growing pressure to right the wrongs of the Trump administration’s immigration policies and keep families out of detention facilities. One of its solutions has been to stress the importance of funding digital methods for tracking immigrants rather than physically imprisoning them. The digital alternatives program has been growing in recent years, with funding increasing from $28m in 2006 to $440m in 2021.
The “alternatives to detention” program tracks 96,574 individuals, but the Biden administration’s 2022 budget request calls to increase that number by approximately 45,000 to 140,000.
These alternatives “support migrants as they navigate their legal obligations”, the Biden administration has said, and are meant to be less-harmful alternatives to physical detention. But Julie Mao, an immigration attorney with Just Futures Law and an editor on the report, said that is not the case.