Listening to this implausible scheme added to my growing sense that Concepcion was fraying around the edges. Aside from dealing with his routine mental-health issues, he was now under tremendous financial pressure: unemployed, yet on the hook for upwards of $3,000 a month in AI subscriptions and hosting services. “Last night I just laid down and cried,” he said to me during one vulnerable moment. “I was like, fuck, this has been a tough thing, this whole not knowing what’s going to happen, not knowing where the next paycheck’s going to come from.”
People in Concepcion’s orbit know he tends to let his better angels blot out his common sense. Curt Hedges, an executive at a health supplements company who befriended Concepcion years ago, once contributed a large sum to Concepcion’s charitable effort to purchase equipment for a group of Laotian photographers. “He doesn’t have a moderate switch—it’s either all in or all out,” he says. Yet Hedges has seen how Concepcion’s passions, however noble, can lead to personal problems, including massive credit-card debt. And when he started getting 3 am texts from Concepcion about DEICER, Hedges began to worry. “I’ve been hesitant to rescue him, because when you rescue him it just gets him another six months down further into that situation,” he told me. “It isn’t as healthy as it should be.”
When ICE swarmed into Minneapolis this winter, its agents came equipped with all manner of sophisticated surveillance tools. As first reported by 404 Media, for example, ICE was now deploying an app called ELITE that uses Medicaid and other confidential health data to identify potential detainees. Agents were also increasing their reliance on Webloc, software that can track every cell phone within a multi-block radius.
But the city’s spirited resistance was not without its own technological resources. In addition to Signal chats, many locals embraced People Over Papers, a crowdsourced mapping tool at IceOut.org that has a lot in common with DEICER. The site teemed with scores of eyewitness reports about suspected ICE agents staking out schools, chatting with local cops, and eating in taquerias.
I reached out to Concepcion in mid-January to get his take on the situation in Minneapolis and to ask about his continued back-and-forth with Apple—I knew he was now preparing his third appeal of DEICER’s expulsion from the App Store. But when we connected, he said he had a much more pressing concern on his mind. On the morning of January 9, ICE had arrested Gabriel’s father.
According to Concepcion, Gabriel’s father had been driving with his wife to the restaurant when they were stopped. Concepcion said the agents commended the couple on being cooperative, then gave them an agonizing choice: One of them would have to submit to arrest, while the other could go free. Gabriel’s father volunteered to take the fall and had subsequently been transported to Batavia, the same detention center where his son had spent a few terrible weeks in April.
Concepcion dropped everything to once more provide material assistance to Gabriel’s family. He arranged a meeting with a lawyer, who noted that bail was highly unlikely given the current environment; he instead recommended filing a habeas petition, a legal maneuver that could take many months to be processed. (Since January 2025, more than 30,000 people in immigration detention have filed habeas petitions.) Concepcion also drove to Batavia to visit Gabriel’s father, who was in poor health due to the facility’s conditions. Sections of the center are so underheated during winter that detainees have nicknamed them Las Hieleras—the Iceboxes.
