Why is Apple hosting an assassin’s app?

ICEBlock is an app that uses real-time information to pinpoint the location of ICE agents in the field. Launched in April in response to Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, it now boasts more than one million users across the country.

Among them, until recently, was self-styled “anti-fascist” sniper Joshua Jahn, who killed one person – a detainee – and critically injured two more at an ICE facility in Dallas. The FBI has discovered that Jahn used the app, or one like it, to track his intended victims. In a handwritten note, Jahn, who took his own life, wrote, “Hopefully this will give ICE agents real terror.”

ICEBlock claims that its purpose is to help illegal immigrants evade arrest by alerting them to the presence of ICE agents. But its far more wicked use as an assassin’s tool has for a long time been all too easy to predict with the left’s prolific and incendiary rhetoric around “Nazis” and “fascists,” the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the new record-high of left-wing terror attacks.

And it is almost inevitable that another targeted attack based on data from the app will happen again.

That’s because Apple is still hosting ICEBlock and apps like it on its App Store. The big tech platform that notoriously removed the conservative social media app Parler for far more nebulous claims of harm after Jan. 6. seems perfectly content to aid future would-be assassins. Apparently, Big Tech is more worried about censoring conservative grannies for wrongthink than it is actual real world violence.

ICEBlock was developed by Joshua Aaron, a tech bro and former indie musician from Texas. It allows activists to drop a pin on a map wherever they spot ICE agents, which then sends a notification to all other users in a five mile radius.

“We don’t want anything being discoverable,” Aaron said in a gushing profile for CNN earlier this year. “And so, this is 100 percent anonymous and free for anybody who wants to use it.”

Of course, ICEBlock would never explicitly incite violence, it would like you to know. Upon log-in, a legal disclaimer states, “Please note that the use of this app is for information and notification purposes only.”

Aaron says he’s the good guy, someone who wants to “fight back” against the rising tide of Nazism in America. He only cares about “keeping people safe,” he told The Guardian in another fawning interview.

And playing the victim in an interview with USA Today, he claimed it was “insanity” to link his app with the Texas shooting and that the DOJ was merely “trying to bully [him].” Indeed, he has seemed much more concerned that his wife was let go from her job as a forensic auditor at the Department of Justice because of her ties to the app.

Most tech founders would sell their first-born to mirror ICEBlock’s growth: it boasted just 20,000 users in June, but as of September Aaron says there are 1.1 million active users across the country – all of whom seem perfectly happy to help would-be assassins find their next victim.

The app has come under fire from both ICE agents on the ground as well high-ranking Trump officials for putting a very real target on agents’ backs.

“The DOJ’s looking at it, and they need to throw some people in jail,” Border Czar Tom Homan said of ICEBlock over the summer.

But little if anything beyond some angry letters and statements has so far been done.

With the implicit endorsement of mainstream media and big tech, ICEBlock has enjoyed a stamp of institutional legitimacy along with all the impunity that affords. But the days of normalizing leftist agitators with a wink and a nod are over.

Aaron can cry peaceful resistance as much as he wants, but violent attacks against ICE agents become inevitable in a climate where they’re deemed Nazis and any lunatic is free to track their real-time movements. Denying this reality beggars belief; anyone who does so is stupid, or more likely, lying, and indifferent to violence against agents.

Attorney General Pam Bondi warned Aaron to “watch out” in July, but it’s time for her office to initiate a real crackdown. Whether through cultural or government pressure, Apple must no longer allow apps like ICEBlock to proliferate, and the full force of the federal government must be used to scrutinize Aaron’s activities. Or these attacks are only going to keep happening.

This isn’t a matter of free speech, but a matter of very real harm as we saw in Texas.

Yet it’s an even deeper question of what kind of country we want to live in: one where ICE agents are seen as brownshirts for enforcing basic U.S. law, or one where law, order, and common sense receive the unanimous respect necessary for a functioning nation?

We can’t have a country without borders. Those who claim otherwise have enjoyed more than enough time dominating the Overton window, and deserve to go back to the fringe.