ICE's 'Frightening' Facial Recognition App is Scanning US Citizens Without Their Consent
"An ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien," said the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee.
Immigration agents are using facial recognition software as "definitive" evidence to determine immigration status and is collecting data from US citizens without their consent. In some cases, agents may detain US citizens, including ones who can provide their birth certificates, if the app says they are in the country illegally.
These are a few of the findings from a series of articles published this past week by 404 Media, which has obtained documents and video evidence showing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents are using a smartphone app in the field during immigration stops, scanning the faces of people on the street to verify their citizenship.
The report found that agents frequently conduct stops that "seem to have little justification beyond the color of someone’s skin... then look up more information on that person, including their identity and potentially their immigration status."
While it is not clear what application the agencies are using, 404 previously reported that ICE is using an app called Mobile Fortify that allows ICE to simply point a camera at a person on the street. The photos are then compared with a bank of more than 200 million images and dozens of government databases to determine info about the person, including their name, date of birth, nationality, and information about their immigration status.
On Friday, 404 published an internal document from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which stated that "ICE does not provide the opportunity for individuals to decline or consent to the collection and use of biometric data/photograph collection." The document also states that the image of any face that agents scan, including those of US citizens, will be stored for 15 years.
The outlet identified several videos that have been posted to social media of immigration officials using the technology.
In one, taken in Chicago, armed agents in sunglasses and face coverings are shown accosting a pair of Hispanic teenagers on bicycles, asking where they are from. The 16-year-old boy who filmed the encounter said he is "from here"—an American citizen—but that he only has a school ID on him. The officer tells the boy he'll be allowed to leave if he'll "do a facial." The other officer then snaps a photo of him with a phone camera and asks his name.
In another video, also in Chicago, agents are shown surrounding a driver, who declines to show his ID. Without asking, one officer points his phone at the man. "I’m an American citizen, so leave me alone,” the driver says. "Alright, we just got to verify that,” the officer responds.
Even if the people approached in these videos had produced identification proving their citizenship, there's no guarantee that agents would have accepted it, especially if the app gave them information to the contrary.
On Wednesday, ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), told 404 that ICE agents will even trust the app's results over a person's government documents.
“ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien,” he said.
This is despite the fact that, as Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told 404, “face recognition technology is notoriously unreliable, frequently generating false matches and resulting in a number of known wrongful arrests across the country."
Thompson said: "ICE using a mobile biometrics app in ways its developers at CBP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms.”
According to an investigation published in October by ProPublica, more than 170 US citizens have been detained by immigration agents, often in squalid conditions, since President Donald Trump returned to office in January. In many of these cases, these individuals have been detained because agents wrongly claimed the documents proving their citizenship are false.
During a press conference this week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem denied this reality, stating that "no American citizens have been arrested or detained" as part of Trump's "mass deportation" crusade.
"We focus on those who are here illegally," she said.
But as DHS's internal document explains, facial recognition software is necessary in the first place because "ICE agents do not know an individual's citizenship at the time of the initial encounter."
David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, explains that the use of such technology suggests that ICE's operations are not "highly targeted raids," as it likes to portray, but instead "random fishing expeditions."
