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“You don’t got no ID?” a Border Patrol agent in a baseball cap, sunglasses, and neck gaiter asks a kid on a bike. The officer and three others had just stopped the two young men on their bikes during the day in what a video documenting the incident says is Chicago. One of the boys is filming the encounter on his phone. He says in the video he was born here, meaning he would be an American citizen.
When the boy says he doesn’t have ID on him, the Border Patrol officer has an alternative. He calls over to one of the other officers, “can you do facial?” The second officer then approaches the boy, gets him to turn around to face the sun, and points his own phone camera directly at him, hovering it over the boy’s face for a couple seconds. The officer then looks at his phone’s screen and asks for the boy to verify his name. The video stops.
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Do you have any more videos of ICE or CBP using facial recognition? Do you work at those agencies or know more about Mobile Fortify? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at <a href="mailto:joseph@404media.co">joseph@404media.co</a>.
In another video of a different incident, this time filmed from the perspective of a driver that authorities have also apparently stopped in Chicago, a group of ICE officers surround the driver side window. One of the officers, wearing a vest from Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), tells one of his coworkers the driver is refusing to be ID’d. The second ICE official then points his own phone camera at the driver.
“I’m an American citizen so leave me alone,” the driver says.
“Alright, we just got to verify that,” one of the officers says, with some of the group peering at the phone. The officer with the phone points the camera at the driver again, and asks him to remove his hat. “If you could take your hat off, it would be a lot quicker,” the ICE officer says. “I’m going to run your information.”
These videos and others reviewed by 404 Media show that ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are actively using smartphone facial recognition technology in the field, including in stops that seem to have little justification beyond the color of someone’s skin, to then look up more information on that person, including their identity and potentially their immigration status. It is not clear which specific app the officers in the videos are using. 404 Media previously revealed ICE has a new app called Mobile Fortify, which scans someone’s face and is built on a database of 200 million images. The app queries an unprecedented number of government databases to return the subject’s name, date of birth, alien number, and whether they’ve been given an order of deportation.
The videos are evidence that the more high tech ambitions of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign are now a reality. While many ICE operations have been distinctly lowtech, such as simply targeting brown people at a Home Depot parking lot, it is now clear that ICE’s investment in facial recognition technology is an option for officers who are pulling people over or targeting them.
“From these videos it seems like ICE has started using live face recognition in the field,” Allison McDonald, assistant professor of computing & data science at Boston University, told 404 Media in an email. McDonald previously worked on a Georgetown Law, Center on Privacy & Technology report into ICE’s data-driven deportation strategy.
A screenshot of one of the videos, via X.“The growing use of face recognition by ICE shows us two things: that we should have banned government use of face recognition when we had the chance because it is dangerous, invasive, and an inherent threat to civil liberties and that any remaining pretense that ICE is harassing and surveilling people in any kind of ‘precise’ way should be left in the dust,” Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told 404 Media in an email.
404 Media has seen several videos across social media that appear to show immigration authorities using facial recognition technology. Often the videos include little context beyond what is happening directly in front of the camera, but do sometimes include officials making explicit references to the technology, like with the Border Patrol officer who asked “can you do facial?”
In another video from earlier this year filmed in New Mexico, a group of ICE and Border Patrol agents stand on and near a porch. “Technology, man, huh,” one of the two subjects the agents are surrounding says. One of the Border Patrol agents looks at their phone, while another walks up and squarely points their phone’s camera at another subject’s face. For a brief moment the video shows the officer has the camera app, or another app using the camera, open.
The caption of the video claims “After conducting a search and subsequently arresting individuals at a local horse training facility, authorities then went to nearby residences for further searches and citizenship verification. Identifications were verified utilizing biometrics (facial recognition).”
A local news report about the incident quotes Efren Aguilar Jr., a resident of the property and a U.S. citizen, as saying “They asked if we lived here, we said ‘yes.’ They asked for documentation and if we were U.S. citizens, and we said ‘yes.’ And then they wanted us to let them go into our house, that’s when we refused.” Aguilar told the local media outlet that other colleagues were arrested.
A screenshot of one of the videos, via Instagram.The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) declined to comment on ICE’s use of facial recognition technology, with its statement saying “DHS is not going to confirm or deny law enforcement capabilities or methods.” CBP, meanwhile, confirmed it is using Mobile Fortify. “CBP relies on a variety of technological capabilities that enhance the effectiveness of agents on the ground. This is one of many tools we are using as we enforce the laws of our nation,” a CBP spokesperson said in an email.
404 Media first revealed the existence of Mobile Fortify in June based on leaked emails. The underlying system used for the facial recognition part of the app is ordinarily used when people enter or exit the U.S. The emails showed the app is also capable of scanning a subject’s fingerprints. “The Mobile Fortify App empowers users with real-time biometric identity verification capabilities utilizing contactless fingerprints and facial images captured by the camera on an ICE issued cell phone without a secondary collection device,” one of the emails said. The explicit goal of the app is to let ICE officers identify people in the field, according to the emails.
404 Media then viewed user manuals for Mobile Fortify which gave more detail on the databases it queries after an officer uploads a photo of someone’s face. Those documents showed Mobile Fortify uses a bank of 200 million images, and sources data from the State Department, CBP, the FBI, and states. Users can also run a “Super Query,” which queries multiple datasets at once related to “individuals, vehicles, airplanes, vessels, addresses, phone numbers and firearms,” according to a memo 404 Media viewed.
Those documents indicated Mobile Fortify may soon include data from commercial data brokers too. One section said that “currently, LexisNexis is not supported in the application.” LexisNexis’s data can include peoples’ addresses, phone number, and associates.
“If Mobile Fortify integrates with something like LexisNexis or another social media monitoring service, it's not just the person on the street who could be identified, but their friends and family as well,” McDonald said.
ICE has also purchased technology from the facial recognition company Clearview AI for years. Clearview’s database of tens of billions of images comes in large part from the open web, which the company scraped en masse. Clearview’s results show users other photos of the same person and where online they were found, potentially leading to someone’s identity. In September 404 Media reported ICE spent millions of dollars on Clearview technology to find people it believed were “assaulting” officers.
404 Media reported ICE has also bought mobile iris scanning tech for its deportation arm. Originally that technology, from a company called BI2 Technologies, was designed for sheriffs to identify inmates or other known persons.
Ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee Bennie G. Thompson said in a statement “Mobile Fortify is a dangerous tool in the hands of ICE, and it puts American citizens at risk of detention and even deportation.” He also said “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. 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.”
Guariglia from the EFF added “there are a lot of surveillance companies eager to profit off the fact that face recognition turns our bodies into identifying documents for the government to read.”
Jeramie Scott, senior counsel and director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s (EPIC) Surveillance Oversight Program, told 404 Media in an email, “facial recognition is a powerful and dangerous surveillance technology that further takes away control from the people and gives it to the government. Its use should not be taken lightly.”
“ICE’s deployment of facial recognition on whoever they deem suspicious is pure dystopian creep—the continual expansion of surveillance until our reality mirrors the dystopian worlds of science fiction. ICE continues to prove why law enforcement’s use of surveillance technology needs strict regulation to limit its expansion and to protect our privacy and civil liberties. Our failure to do this will lead us down a road where our democracy becomes unrecognizable,” he added.
About the author
Joseph is an award-winning investigative journalist focused on generating impact. His work has triggered hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fines, shut down tech companies, and much more.
