Vibe coding often gets a bad rep. “Vibe” is a euphemism for “not really thinking,” and that “not really thinking” part is accomplished by letting an AI spit all the code out in response to natural language prompts. Inexperienced programmers use it to push out half-baked apps and sabotage their own projects, and experienced ones get lulled into making rookie mistakes.
Enter one man who’s putting AI coding tools to extremely good use: Rafael Concepcion, a second-generation immigrant and former professor at Syracuse University who’s made it his personal mission to foil Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to a new profile in Wired — a quest that would come at great personal cost, including his university job.
Concepcion is behind a number mobile apps designed to counter ICE activities]. He started with an app to teach immigrants how to exercise their constitutional rights when approached by ICE agents. To build it, he heavily used AI tools like Cursor, an AI-integrated coding environment, and ElevenLabs, a leading AI voice synthesizer.
In a quintessentially American image, Wired describes how Concepcion would spend his nights building his opus.
“Concepcion did most of his vibe coding between midnight and dawn while parked outside a Home Depot in his electric F-150 pickup,” Wired wrote. “He chose the spot to feel kinship with the day laborers he hoped to reach, and he listened to endless repeats of songs from [the musical] ‘Hamilton‘ as he worked.”
In a sense, Concepcion is merely leveling the playing the field: ICE leverages an AI surveillance panoptic to follow, menace, and deport civilians.
Eventually, Concepcion realized that simply educating immigrants of their rights wasn’t going to help much if ICE agents rounded them up unconstitutionally anyway. Instead, he wanted to vibe code a tool that could “stop these people from falling off a cliff, stop these people from disappearing.”
Concepcion called his overhauled app “DEICER.” It gave users the ability to report ICE activity with pins on a map, and people close to those locations would receive an alert on their phone with information including a description and photos of the ICE agents.
Per Wired, the app was downloaded more than 3,000 times within a matter of days of hitting the App Store, and peaked at 30,000 users. But with it came a barrage of death threats — so many that he started shopping for a bulletproof vest, according to the reporting.
Threats also came from the US government. On October 2, the Justice Department demanded Apple remove all apps that “put ICE agents at risk for doing their jobs.” A day later, Concepcion received an email from Apple stating his app had been removed from the App Store because its “purpose is to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.”
Not to be deterred, Concepcion released a web browser version of his app, cooking up city-specific versions of his DEICER platform all across the country. It wasn’t until he collaborated with a North Carolina immigrant rights, Siembra NC, that his counter-ICE tools began to really take off. Together, they made OJO Obrero, a more moderated platform that would ensure that user reports were verified and weren’t becoming noise that added to the general paranoia and pandemonium.
Catastrophe struck, however, when nefarious actors hacked DEICER and Concepcion’s other counter-ICE projects, and the resulting right-wing feeding frenzy led him to becoming the target of a Fox News story that described him as part of a “shadow network of anti-ICE scouts.” Amid all this, US Customs and Border Patrol revoked his Global Entry status without explanation, he told Wired.
Nonetheless, Concepcion perseveres. His anti-ICE tools are back online, and he plans to stick to his mission. “There’s just something telling me to try something else, and I can’t explain it,” he told the magazine. “If I’m completely honest, I don’t want to explain it. I just want to keep going.”
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