ICE Wants To Hand Out Its Unproven Facial Recognition Tech To Thousands Of Cops

from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept

The Trump administration has thrown billions at purging non-white people from this country. Most of that has ended up in the hands of ICE, which has — in turn — thrown hundreds of millions at a number of private companies offering bespoke and/or off-the-shelf surveillance solutions.

The slide down the slippery slope began less than six months after Trump took office in 2025, with the DHS repurposing tech used at border crossings for deployment as far inland as ICE, CBP, etc. were willing to travel. The facial recognition app of choice is “Mobile Fortify,” which ties into the DHS’s pre-existing databases and makes use of any number of third-party facial recognition products. (Which may include the much-reviled Clearview AI, yet another company being paid millions to provide the government with questionable tech predicated on even more questionable business ethics.)

As has almost always been the case with the DHS, the tech was primed, pumped, and deployed without proper testing or legally required privacy impact assessments (PIA) in place. And it was in such a hurry to spread its surveillance tech throughout the nation that it willingly deployed a product that not only couldn’t reliably do the one thing it was asked to do — verify identities — but was only able to be deployed by unilaterally stripping away Congressional limits placed on government use of facial recognition tech.

We’re still waiting on PIAs for Mobile Fortify to arrive and we certainly don’t expect them anytime soon. We also haven’t seen the DHS even pretend to address the app’s major flaws. One would think an app that’s still half-broken would have an extremely short lifespan. But this administration doesn’t care whether or not it works well. It’s only interested in subjecting as many people as possible to it.

Apparently, it’s not enough that thousands of federal agents have access to this app. As Joseph Cox reports for 404 Media, ICE wants to make things exponentially worse by giving it to pretty much any cop who wants to give it a whirl.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to give potentially more than a thousand local law enforcement agencies a facial recognition app that would query a database of hundreds of millions of images to verify someone’s immigration status, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media.

Regular cops will be given access to “Task Force Module,” which will use the underlying tech (and database access) found in the ICE app. Apparently the only difference is that TFM will provide text prompts to cops once the app has finished (mis)identifying someone.

When an officer scans someone’s face, the app will run their face against a database of more than 250 million DHS and State Department records, and then provide instructions to the officer. Either “not detain or arrest under ICE jurisdiction,” or the app will provide a reference code the officer can use to get additional information from ICE.

The document readily admits that DHS expects this app to be used on US citizens. After all, how else can you verify their citizenship? I mean other than the documents people normally carry on them, like ID cards. Or the fact that people not crossing US borders aren’t legally obligated to prove they’re citizens to federal officers just because they’ve decided to spend more time far away from the nation’s borders. This app is a perversion of the American way — a point-and-shoot “papers please” by proxy that allows officers to, in essence, demand production of documents they’re not entitled to ask for.

If ICE, etc. actually cared enough to do their job right, an app like this wouldn’t be necessary. It should have stayed at the border where the government has the right to demand proof of citizenship. Now, this surveillance kudzu will become another toy for cops who are similarly uninterested in respecting rights and equally willing to treat everyone like a suspect because it’s easier than actually doing the legwork.

“Papers please” everywhere all the time is disturbing enough. But giving officers another surveillance toy that’s flawed and deployed without absolutely zero oversight is just going to deliver new horror stories of surveillance abuse by powerful government employees who know no one above them cares what happens to those the government turns its cameras on. Cops and federal agents alike are going to use the tech to stalk and harass protesters, critics, and anyone else they might want to fuck with. And all in service of a bigoted push to rid the nation of people who actually make it great.

Filed Under: cbp, dhs, facial recognition, facial recognition tech, ice, mass deportation, surveillance, trump administration

Companies: clearview ai, mobile fortify