ICE's Ankle-Monitor Population More Than Doubled. Its Contractor's Revenue From the Program Fell 3.6%.

Most people on ICE's "non-detained docket" — more than three million of them, by TRAC's count — are left to check in with the agency once a year or less.▸ A smaller group is placed under closer watch: the Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program, run for ICE under a federal contract by BI Incorporated, a subsidiary of The GEO Group. BI monitors people through three technologies — GPS ankle or wrist monitors, the SmartLINK phone app, and telephonic check-ins — under a contract known as ISAP, the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, now in a new two-year term that took effect October 1, 2025. The headcount under that contract barely moved this year. Which technology is doing the watching changed a great deal.

TRAC at Syracuse University files monthly Freedom of Information Act requests for ICE's anonymized ATD records and publishes the results as a running dataset.▸ On April 4, 2026, it counted 180,701 people enrolled nationally — essentially flat against the 183,635 enrolled on the same weekday a year earlier, on April 5, 2025. Zoomed out, the total has held in a narrow band, roughly 178,000 to 192,000, through every snapshot TRAC has published since January 2024. Whatever else changed about ICE's monitoring apparatus this year, how many people it reaches did not change much.

What shifted was the mix.▸ TRAC's own technology breakdown shows the number of people tracked by SmartLINK — a phone app that uses facial recognition and GPS — falling from 159,610 to 131,643, a drop of 17.5%. Over the same year, the number tracked by physical GPS devices worn on the ankle or wrist rose from 22,467 to 49,009, a gain of 118%. ICE shifted tens of thousands of people from the loosest form of monitoring in its toolkit to the tightest one, without changing how many people it was monitoring in total.

The same dataset's own duration field shows people staying enrolled longer, too: the average time someone spends on ATD rose from 658 days to 767 days over that year — more than two years, on average, under some form of ICE-directed monitoring.▸ TRAC's own notes on the program caution that "once assigned to an ATD program, people on average remain under ATD monitoring for several years."

BI Incorporated's parent company independently confirmed the same direction of travel to its own shareholders.▸ In the exhibit attached to its first-quarter 2026 earnings release, GEO Group told investors that "the number of ISAP participants on GPS ankle bracelets has increased to more than 48,000 currently from 17,000 in early 2025," while SmartLINK enrollment "declined to approximately 131,000 currently from approximately 159,000 in early 2025" — figures that land within a few thousand of TRAC's independently sourced counts above, filed by a defense-oriented FOIA outlet and reported by the company itself to federal securities regulators.

GEO Group discloses its ISAP-related business inside a broader reporting segment it calls Electronic Monitoring and Supervision Services, which also covers non-ICE contracts — GPS and monitoring services sold to state and local governments for parolees, probationers, and pretrial defendants.▸ In its Form 10-K for fiscal year 2025, filed with the SEC on February 25, 2026, the company reported that segment's total revenue fell from $332.8 million in 2024 to $320.9 million in 2025 — a decline of $11.9 million, or 3.6%. GEO Group's own management discussion attributes the drop specifically to ISAP: revenue fell, the filing states, "primarily due to decreases in average participant counts under the Intensive Supervision and Appearance Program."

That explanation sits somewhat awkwardly next to TRAC's point-in-time snapshots, which show the national ATD population down only 1.6% between the two April dates above — not the larger decline a 3.6% revenue drop might suggest.▸ The two figures are not measuring the same thing: GEO Group's is a fiscal-year average across all twelve months of 2025 and includes non-ICE monitoring contracts, while TRAC's is a single-day count taken a year apart. Both can be true at once. What the two sources agree on, independently, is the direction of the technology shift — toward more ankle and wrist monitors, away from phone-based tracking — even as the company's revenue from the segment that includes ISAP went down, not up.

GEO Group's Electronic Monitoring and Supervision Services segment revenue includes state and local monitoring contracts alongside ICE's ISAP contract; it is not an ISAP-only figure, and this piece treats it as such throughout.