U.S. lawmakers investigate whether the Department of Justice pressured Apple and Google to remove immigration enforcement monitoring apps

The House Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, Jamie Raskin (Democrat from Maryland), has launched an investigation to verify whether the U.S. Department of Justice pressured Apple and Google to remove ICEBlock and similar apps from the App Store.

The report states: “Raskin has requested the Department of Justice to submit all communications between it and Google and Apple regarding the related crowdsourced reporting apps for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel.”

According to Tech Home, in October last year, Apple removed ICEBlock from the App Store just hours before U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland confirmed: “We contacted Apple today and asked them to remove the ICEBlock app from the App Store — and Apple complied.”

At that time, Apple justified the removal by saying: “We built the App Store to provide users with a safe and trustworthy platform for discovering apps. Based on security risk information related to ICEBlock provided by law enforcement, we have removed this app and similar apps from the App Store.”

Now, Raskin is demanding a formal explanation of the Department of Justice’s involvement in this app removal incident to determine whether federal officials improperly intervened in Apple and Google’s content moderation decisions.

According to reports, Raskin wrote in his letter: “This coercion and censorship campaign ultimately targets users of ICE monitoring apps, apparently to suppress criticism of the current government and to hide any evidence that might expose government lies, including its Orwellian efforts to conceal the Renee and Alex incident…”

The report also notes that although Raskin’s request is likely to be ignored, if the Democrats regain control of the House in this year’s midterm elections, it may only be a temporary delay, “because Raskin is very likely to become the chair of the committee at that time.”