In an era of heightened immigration enforcement, this digital mapping platform helps communities stay vigilant

In his inauguration speech on Jan. 20, the first item on President Donald Trump’s list of priorities for his second term was to return “millions and millions of criminal aliens,” as he put it, “back to the places from which they came.”

Two days later, People Over Papers was born: a collaborative mapping platform that allows vulnerable communities to track immigration enforcement activity in real time.

“It happened very, very fast, and it spread very fast,” said Celeste, the platform’s co-founder, who requested that her last name not be published for security reasons due the the nature of her work.

People Over Papers enables users to both report and browse crowdsourced sightings of immigration agents and enforcement nationwide. As Trump’s immigration crackdown continues to intensify — with recent operations often involving surprise raids and arrests by plainclothes or masked immigration officers — the platform has quickly become a go-to resource.

In an era where daily life for many immigrants is increasingly clouded by fear and uncertainty, developers have created these tools for people seeking to stay vigilant. In recent weeks, several of these resources have been taken down by major tech companies including Apple, Google and Meta. One of these was People Over Papers. But the site was quickly restored, and other platforms are now working to challenge these takedowns and keep similar tools accessible.

That recovery matters, said Celeste, because for many users, People Over Papers functions “like a weather app.”

“People have started using it in the mornings [to see], ‘where does it seem like most of the activity is happening? Are there places I should avoid? Is there something going on on my way to work or back home?’”

Accessible at ICEOUT.org, the site opens to a map of the United States dotted with pins, each representing a report of immigration enforcement activity or the presence of federal agents. Submissions also include details such as descriptions of officers’ clothing and the time and nature of the encounter.

Verifying reported sightings

The site is updated throughout the day by nearly 60 volunteers across the country who carefully vet incoming reports. While some agents are seen wearing clearly marked uniforms, identifying them as part of agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Border Patrol or the FBI, such visible identification is increasingly rare, Celeste said, making it more challenging to confirm immigration enforcement activity.

In cases where reports lack clear identifying details, the volunteers turn to community sources to help verify them, including social media accounts and websites maintained by local advocacy groups. In Los Angeles, for instance, the team frequently monitors updates from organizations such as Unión del Barrio, Siempre Unidos LA and Long Beach Rapid Response Network. Volunteers also review links to live video feeds on Facebook Live and TikTok.

A report is not marked as “confirmed” unless it is verified by a second reliable source, Celeste said. If no such source is available, but certain context clues suggest the presence of immigration enforcement — such as activity in areas known for frequent ICE operations, masked individuals or agents who decline to identify themselves — the report may be labeled as “probably immigration enforcement activity.”

The platform also includes categories such as “unverified/suspicious law enforcement activity,” “National Guard” and “private security.”

According to Celeste, the platform’s volunteers come from a wide range of backgrounds — including students, teachers, stay-at-home parents and paralegals. They span all age groups, and represent various points along the political spectrum. What they share, Celeste said, is a common belief that “what is happening today is a huge injustice.”

No more safe spaces

As the Trump administration expands ICE’s authority into spaces that were previously off-limits, including schools, churches and hospitals, platforms like People Over Papers have become widely used tools for flagging unexpected enforcement activity in areas once considered safe.

Since Donald Trump returned to office, ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have made more than 228,000 arrests. As of Oct. 29, nearly 60,000 people are currently in immigration detention, according to federal data compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. More than 70 percent of them have no criminal record.

The Department of Homeland Security announced that the Trump administration is on pace to deport nearly 600,000 immigrants by the end of the president’s first year back in office.

In the days following the inauguration, before there was a volunteer team, Celeste collected and logged individual reports sent through private messages on social media, manually adding each sighting to a public Google Map. However, as reports surged — especially following ICE’s immigration raids in Chicago just days after President Trump’s inauguration — it became clear to her that the system needed to evolve.

Now hosted on its own site, People Over Papers can share reports more efficiently and better support its rapidly growing user base. Since its launch, the site has drawn over 15.8 million unique visitors and more than 80.6 million page views, and has averaged between 200,000 and 300,000 users per day.

“This platform has had impact in ways that I did not expect it to have,” Celeste said. “I just saw that people wanted to share information — whatever they wanted to share it for, whether it be [wanting] to let people that are vulnerable to being deported know about activity, whether they want to show the cruelty behind a specific detainment, [or] whether they want to just let their community members know and form a local protest or demonstration.”

Users she has heard from through comments on social media and via private messages range from construction workers and landscapers, monitoring ICE activity throughout the day near their job sites, to students who use the app to plan safer routes home from school. Many have shared that they check the platform daily.

Targeting and takedown of tracking platforms

Within the charged political climate, both building and scaling the platform has not come without risks. When Celeste first created People Over Papers, she said she experienced “extreme” paranoia about the attention it might attract. As the public face of the platform, she has experienced online harassment and received anonymous threats through submissions to the site, directed at both her and the broader team.

“We just never know if we’ll be targeted,” Celeste said.

On the morning of Oct. 5, Padlet — the platform that initially hosted People Over Papers — removed the page without prior warning, later citing unspecified violations of its content policy.

“From my perspective, we’re doing everything right,” Celeste said. “We’re not doing anything that breaks the law in any way, shape or form … so I’d be curious to know what exactly we violated, if [Padlet] would ever let us know.”

Padlet did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Annenberg Media.

The move came three days after Apple removed ICEBlock, another platform that allowed users to share the locations of ICE officers and other agents. Apple said in a statement at the time that the decision to remove the app was based on “information we’ve received from law enforcement about the safety risks” associated with officers’ locations being known. Some legal experts have said such apps could prove difficult to ban, however, because they fall under protected free speech.

Four days before People Over Papers was taken down, far-right activist Laura Loomer shared a post on X urging Padlet CEO Nitesh Goel to remove the page and ban users who “dox and track” ICE agents.

The platform was offline for six hours, the longest outage since its launch.

But People Over Papers was back online the same day, hosted on its own site. The team had already been preparing to publish the new platform Oct. 12, so the takedown only required speeding up the launch timeline by a week.

With its transition to an independent platform, People Over Papers has introduced new features to improve the user experience. Recent updates include a color-coded risk key — green for “low risk,” yellow for “high risk” and red for “critical risk” — and a verification badge at the top of each report indicating if it has been confirmed.

The team is also developing backup plans in case the site is taken down again.

“We’re going to do everything possible for us to continue operating,” Celeste said. “And I would not be surprised if we were targeted again, whether it be from the federal government, whether it be from bad actors, individuals, but we’re going to continue doing our best to provide this for people.”

As the number of available platforms like People Over Papers continues to shrink, Celeste and her team remain committed to maintaining a space that “cuts out all the noise of everything else that’s happening around us,” she said, sharing timely, reliable information by whatever means they can.

“The harder they want to silence us, not allow us to use our freedom of expression,” Celeste said, “I think that only motivates the movement more.”