ICE Agents Tap Facial Recognition Technology On Phones

By Michelle Hackman, Arian Campo-Flores and Hannah Critchfield

The Wall Street Journal
Jan 05, 2026

Until recently, arresting an immigrant suspected of being in the country illegally took time. Immigration agents needed to run the suspect’s various forms of ID through different systems, and if the results were inconclusive, book the person into custody for further investigation.


But during President Trump’s second term, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have been handed a powerful new tool to speed up arrests: mobile facial recognition technology. Officers can simply point their phones at a suspect’s face, snap a picture and turn up the person’s identity—and often their immigration status.


The app, called Mobile Fortify, has in the past few months become a routine feature of ICE arrests, according to current and former government officials.


Agency officials say the technology has made arrests both faster and more accurate, leading to fewer occasions when officers must detain someone only to learn, hours

later, that they have legal status or are even a U.S. citizen.


With an unprecedented $75 billion infusion from Congress this summer on top of its normal budget, ICE has become the most well-funded law-enforcement agency in the federal government. It has been using that money in part to experiment with new technologies to supercharge Trump’s promised mass deportation. In recent months, the agency has greenlighted a contract for a tool that can scan subjects’ irises and recruited several artificialintelligence-fueled companies to locate immigrants.


“President Trump’s core promise to the American people was to remove criminal and public-safety threats in large numbers, and these technologies provide federal law enforcement tools to make that challenge more manageable,” said Chad Wolf, chairman of homeland security and immigration at the America First Policy Institute and a former acting Homeland Security Secretary during Trump’s first term.


ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, is investing more money than ever in facial recognition technology to power programs including touchless scans at airport security checkpoints and an entry-exit program to track everyone leaving the country on flights, alarming civil-rights advocates. The government’s spending on certain companies known to provide surveillance technologies has jumped significantly in the past decade, with over $30 million in contracts awarded this year, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal contracting data.


“Mobile Fortify is a lawful law-enforcement tool developed under the Trump Administration to support accurate identity and immigration-status verification during enforcement operations,” a DHS spokeswoman said in a statement.


In one instance witnessed by a Journal reporter in July, ICE officers in Lake Worth, Fla., snapped pictures of two Guatemalan men whom a state trooper had just stopped. The app, along with databases the officers could access through a laptop, showed that one of the men had been encountered before by the Border Patrol and given a notice to appear in court, one of them said.


“We have a new app, it’s facial recognition,” the officer said during another stop that day. “If they’ve ever been arrested before and we have their photo in one of our databases…we’ll get a hit.”


The app has access to several government criminal databases. The data include previous encounters with immigration officials, such as if an immigrant was arrested at the southern border or entered at a legal entry point, officials said.


It also taps into publicly available sources, including social media posts, officials familiar with the matter said. That information informs deeper queries the app can conduct, which can provide more information on a person, such as other names they might use, their previous locations and social connections, the officials said.


The DHS spokeswoman said the application doesn’t “access open-source material, scrape social media, or rely on publicly available data. Its use is governed by established legal authorities and formal privacy oversight, which set strict limits on data access, use, and retention.”


ICE guidance states officers don’t need permission to take a photo, though the technology works best when a picture is taken within about 4 feet, according to a government official. The photos are then stored in a government database.


It has been used in the field more than 100,000 times, the official said.


The technology has been programmed to return only confirmed identity matches from facial scans, excluding results that are close but not definitive. ICE is working on offering a scaleddown version of the technology to local police departments that work alongside federal immigration officials.


The app’s existence was earlier reported by 404 media, a digital publication focused on technology and privacy.


Similar technology has hit snags in the past. Under the Biden administration, migrants wanting to enter the country legally could make an appointment at a legal border crossing through an app called CBP One, which required them to snap a photo of themselves as part of the process.


Now, Mobile Fortify’s widespread use by ICE has raised concerns among privacy advocates and some former officials, who argue the app is devouring huge amounts of personal information without adequate oversight.


“It can be used to point at people in the street, people in cars, and scan their facial prints without their consent,” said Kate Voigt, a senior policy counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union.


The DHS spokeswoman said the app is “lawfully used nationwide in accordance with all applicable legal authorities.”


Typically, when the government introduces a new technology involving facial recognition or other personal information, they must file what’s called a “privacy impact assessment.” But the Journal couldn’t find any assessments filed specifically for the new app.


Mobile Fortify was first created by ICE’s sister agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, under the Biden administration. The app was built borrowing from technology that the government is using to build an entry-exit system tracking people who arrive and leave the U.S. on commercial flights, according to current and former government officials.


At first, the tech was handed only to Border Patrol agents, who most often work within 100 miles of the southern border. In that zone, agents can conduct stops and searches without the same constitutional protections that apply in the interior of the country. At the time, lawyers at DHS objected to ICE using the facial recognition tool, citing privacy concerns, some of the current and former government officials said. They warned that a negative court decision could jeopardize the government’s ability to use facial recognition at the border, including at legal entry points, those officials said. The decision was reversed when Trump took office.

Shared via PressReader

connecting people through news