ICE’s facial scanning is the tip of the surveillance iceberg

The federal occupation of Minnesota has, in many ways, been a war of dueling cameras, with observers documenting Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions and masked government agents filming content for the White House to share. Beyond the government’s appetite for social media imagery, the ubiquity of Department of Homeland Security officials with smartphones in hand is a feature of the administration’s deepening embrace of domestic surveillance. From facial scanning to neighborhood mapping and beyond, the White House is using immigration enforcement to bring next-level surveillance to American streets.

‘Broad surveillance dragnet’

ICE agents are “increasingly relying on” Mobile Fortify, a smartphone app that scans a subject’s face and compiles a profile from “multiple federal and state databases,” said The Guardian. According to a lawsuit filed against DHS in January, the app has been used in the field more than 100,000 times. That’s a “drastic shift” from earlier uses of biometric immigration tracking, which had been “limited largely to investigations and ports of entry and exit.”

The mass adoption of surveillance technology deployed on the streets not only allows federal immigration troops to “identify specific targets to detain” but enables them to “monitor entire neighborhoods at once” in a “broad surveillance dragnet” that affects citizens and noncitizens alike, said Sahan Journal. “The surveillance structure and network that’s being created affects us all,” said Munira Mohamed, a policy associate for the American Civil Liberties Union in Minnesota, to CNN.

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There are “sufficient monitoring protocols” in place to ensure correct app usage in the field, said Customs and Border Patrol in a statement to Wired. But ICE claims that its monitoring protocols are still being developed, and the agency will “identify potential impacts during an AI impact assessment,” said Wired.

In addition to Mobile Fortify, DHS agents have been using a new tool called Elite that helps “decide which neighborhoods to raid,” said 404 Media. The software, created by the Trump administration-aligned tech company Palantir, allows DHS agents to “populate a map with potential deportation targets, bring up dossiers on each person, and view an address ‘confidence score’” for deportation action based on government databases.

‘Little confidence’

DHS’s embrace of expansive, ostensibly immigration-focused surveillance technology being used domestically has not gone unnoticed on Capitol Hill. There is major concern about whether DHS is “collecting sensitive personal data that can be used to circumvent civil liberty protections,” said Democratic Virginia Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine in a letter to Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari late last month. The department presides over a “muddled patchwork of technology procurements” that has “significantly expanded” its ability to “collect, retain and analyze information about Americans,” they said. There’s “little confidence that these new and powerful tools are being used responsibly.”

The adoption of mobile surveillance technology by DHS officials is “totally unprecedented,” said ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project Deputy Director Nathan Freed Wessler to Democracy Now. While law enforcement has traditionally used facial recognition “where there’s an image of a suspect,” DHS is targeting swaths of people “using this very glitchy app to try to identify them and match them to immigration records.”