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Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officials are deploying mobile devices facial recognition technology Arrests speed up under President Donald Trump immigration crackdownaccording to a new report.
In recent months, ICE agents have used a government-created app called Mobile enhancement in order to establish identity potential detainees, wall street journal the report said.
It has been hailed by government officials as a powerful new tool, while privacy advocates and Democratic lawmakers have decried it as an unchecked government overreach.
The app allows agents to take a photo of a suspect’s face with their phone and quickly pull up the person’s name, location, social media history — and sometimes even their information. immigration status.
“Mobile Fortify is a lawful law enforcement tool developed by the Trump Administration to support accurate identity and immigration verification during law enforcement operations,” a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, said in a statement.
Agency officials said the app has been used more than 100,000 times to date, helping to speed up arrests and reduce the number of people with legal status being detained.
The developers of Mobile Fortify are U.S. Customs and Border Protection Under President Joe Biden’s term, adjustments have been made to technology already used at U.S. ports of entry. Initially, it was used only by Border Patrol agents operating near the southern border.
But its use has expanded under Trump, who has vowed to take action largest eviction plan in American history. And, now that Congress has allocated an additional $75 billion to ICE, making it the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the country, it has the bandwidth to experiment with and broadly implement new technologies.
this Magazine In recent months, ICE has also moved forward with a contract for technology tools that can be used to scan people’s eyes and hired artificial intelligence companies to find immigrants, noted.
“President Trump’s core commitment to the American people is to eliminate a host of crime and public safety threats, and these technologies provide federal law enforcement tools to make that challenge more manageable,” said Chad Wolf, chair of homeland security and immigration at the America First Policy Institute and former acting DHS secretary during Trump’s first term.
one Magazine Reporters saw the app in action during a July law enforcement operation in Lake Worth, Florida.
ICE officers captured photos of two Guatemalan men who were stopped by state troopers. Mobile Fortify said one of the men has been issued a notice to appear in court.
“We have a new application – it’s facial recognition,” the official said. “If they’ve been arrested before and we have their picture in our database … we’re going to get a crackdown.”
The application has access to multiple criminal databases as well as publicly available information such as an individual’s social media activity.
A DHS spokesperson said the app does not “access open source materials, scrape social media, or rely on publicly available data,” adding that “its use is subject to established legal authorities and formal privacy oversight, which sets strict limits on data access, use, and retention.”
However, privacy advocates warn that widespread use of the technology could enable massive data collection without proper oversight.
“It could be used to point at people on the street, people in their cars, and scan their facial fingerprints without their consent,” Kate Voigt, senior policy adviser at the American Civil Liberties Union, told the newspaper.
“The Mobile Fortify program represents dangerous expansion Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU, wrote in November that “the government’s use of facial recognition technology in Americans’ lives will fundamentally recalibrate the relationship between authorities and individuals in this country. But it must not be that way.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security dismissed the concerns, saying the app is “lawfully used nationwide in accordance with all applicable legal authorities.”
democracy member of congress Questions have also been raised about ICE’s use of Mobile Fortify. In November, Senators Ed Markey, Chris Van Hollen, Bernie Sanders and Adam Schiff asked the agency to stop using the app, claiming it “posed serious privacy and civil liberties risks.”
Similar tools have sparked controversy in the past.
Under Biden, immigrants seeking to enter the country legally were required to make an appointment using an app called CBP One, which required them to upload a photo of themselves.
Immigration advocates and some lawyers have complained that the app often fails to recognize people with darker skin tones, especially Haitian immigrants who find it difficult to use.
According to a December AP-NORC poll, 38% of Americans The proportion of people who support Trump’s handling of immigration is down from 49% in March.