Opposing ICE Might Save the Country. It Could Also Ruin Your Life

The second trump administration was barely a week old when Rafael Concepcion came across the Facebook post that would upend his life. Its author was Maria Hernandez, the owner of a Mexican grocery store popular among Latino residents of New York’s Finger Lakes region. She wrote that several of her best customers had already gone into hiding. With sales plummeting, she offered to make free deliveries of food to anyone too scared of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to leave their home.

Concepcion, a second-generation immigrant and a professor at nearby Syracuse University, was so moved by Hernandez’s generosity that he made the 45-minute drive to her store to pay his respects and spend some money. A burly and gregarious 51-year-old who keeps his hair slicked back, Concepcion wore a black V-neck T-shirt and blue jeans as he perused the aisles filled with pan dulce, tomatillos, and prayer candles. In front of a refrigerator case, he spotted an African American customer staring at packages of chorizo. The man mistook Concepcion for an employee. “I don’t know what any of this stuff is,” the customer said. “But I saw the thing on Facebook, and I wanted to come in and help and support.”

The visit to Hernandez’s store activated something deep inside Concepcion, a moral unease that would gradually blossom into an all-consuming drive to thwart ICE. In early February 2025, he described his experience at the Mexican market—not far from the home of Harriet Tubman—in an op-ed for the Syracuse Post-Standard. “I plan to help in any way I can. I hope you do, too,” he wrote. “History should count on us to do the right thing.” After the column attracted scores of irate comments (“How about FOLLOWING THE LAW. You people make me sick”), Concepcion felt compelled to escalate his activism. Polite op-eds were clearly insufficient against ICE, which had already tripled its daily arrests to more than 600 since President Trump’s latest inauguration.

Before he started teaching multimedia storytelling at Syracuse’s prestigious Newhouse School of Public Communications, Concepcion had worked around the edges of the tech industry for two decades. So he decided to develop a mobile app meant to teach immigrants how to exercise their constitutional rights when confronted by ICE.

Concepcion, who describes himself as having “the worst case of ADD you’ve ever seen,” became hyperfixated on the project. (The black V-neck and jeans he wore to Hernandez’s store are his uniform: He keeps 30 identical shirts and 30 identical pairs of pants to avoid being paralyzed by choice.) He leaned heavily on AI tools such as Cursor and ElevenLabs to build the app. Buzzing on heroic amounts of caffeine—“I drink, like, 14 cups of coffee a day,” he told me—Concepcion did most of his vibe coding between midnight and dawn while parked outside a Home Depot in his electric F-150 pickup. He chose the spot to feel kinship with the day laborers he hoped to reach, and he listened to endless repeats of songs from Hamilton as he worked.

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.

Concepcion grew up in the South Bronx during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the area was synonymous with urban blight. His Puerto Rican father was a janitor who often scavenged for copper so he could treat his seven children to loaves of fresh bread. His mother was a Mexican immigrant from Puebla. A rotating cast of her supposed “uncles” and “cousins” crashed in the family’s apartment as they looked for off-the-books work. Concepcion remembers being amazed that men who’d been engineers back in Mexico were happy to become dishwashers in the US.

A gifted student, Concepcion escaped the Bronx by attending a state university in Plattsburgh, a world away on the frigid shores of Lake Champlain. He was intent on becoming an English teacher, but his plans changed after he discovered the internet. He spent much of college toying with the text-based web browser Lynx and the VAX operating system. That propelled him, after college, into fielding support calls for IBM, then overseeing software training for a German ecommerce company, and finally a long career writing a set of popular guides to Adobe Photoshop.

In 2018, Concepcion settled in Syracuse with his wife, a grade-school teacher, and their young daughter to take a curriculum development job at the university. He also taught a storytelling class as an adjunct, a gig that earned him a contract as an assistant teaching professor in 2022. It was a dream job for Concepcion, a chance to be a role model for two kinds of students in particular: those who share his Latino roots and those dealing with mental-health challenges. “I’m very clear with my students,” he says. “I struggle with ADD, I struggle with depression, I’ve had crisis situations.”