Then, in April, as ICE was ramping up enforcement operations from Maine to California, Concepcion got a panicked message from a chef at one of his favorite Latin restaurants. The man’s adult son, whom I will call Gabriel, had been heading to a construction job in nearby Oswego when Border Patrol agents stopped his car. A Mexican native, Gabriel had handed the agents his immigration paperwork, which showed that his asylum case was pending, but they were unmoved. He was now being held at an overcrowded ICE detention center in Batavia, New York, midway between Buffalo and Rochester. The distraught chef asked Concepcion, whom everyone at the restaurant called “El Profe,” for advice on how to free his son.
Concepcion loves playing the Good Samaritan for people who feel mugged by the system, so he threw himself into trying to liberate Gabriel. He found an attorney willing to take the case for $4,000, then wrote to the judge on Syracuse University letterhead to vouch for Gabriel’s character. After a few anxious weeks, Gabriel was released on $10,000 bail—a rare outcome in 2025, when such releases decreased by 87 percent compared to the year before—and Concepcion volunteered to make the two-hour drive to pick him up.
Their ride home was eerily quiet. As Concepcion studied the exhausted, dejected young man beside him, he began to regret the meekness of the app he was building. What was the point of educating immigrants about their rights if federal agents just ignored them so they could hit arrest quotas? Concepcion realized he should instead create a tool for immigrants that could “stop these people from falling off a cliff, stop these people from disappearing.”
Concepcion overhauled his app to give it a more aggressive edge. The new version gave anyone the ability to report ICE activity by dropping pins onto a map. Users who were close to that pin’s coordinates would then receive a push alert containing detailed information, including photographs, about the agents’ locations and vehicles—information they could use to either organize flash protests or find safe haven. He called this app DEICER.
When the time came to submit DEICER to Apple’s App Store, Concepcion’s anxiety spiked. He worried that the government might bully Apple into handing over a list of accounts that had downloaded the app. But he decided to press forward. “ICE is looking for millions,” Concepcion stated in a video promoting DEICER’s official launch on July 28. “What if millions were looking for ICE?”
With that, DEICER joined a small handful of other crowdsourced mapping tools, like ICEBlock and the Stop ICE text-alert network, that had started to emerge in response to the Trump administration’s mass-deportation campaign. These resources were intended to chip away at ICE’s technological superiority over its motley throng of opponents. With more than $77 billion to spend, ICE has amassed an array of Palantir-powered tools that can pinpoint human targets. The resistance, by contrast, has had to rely on the ingenuity of independent operators like Concepcion, a man whose obsessive streak has since sent him colliding with trolls, hackers, right-wing media giants, and the second-richest company in the world.
