ICE is using Border Patrol mobile facial recognition technology to speed up arrests

Fromm [HERE] Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are deploying mobile facial recognition technology to speed up arrests amid President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, according to a new report.

In recent months, ICE personnel have used a government-created app called Mobile Fortify in order to ascertain the identity of potential detainees, The Wall Street Journal reported.

It’s been hailed as a powerful new tool by administration officials, while privacy advocates have decried it as a form of unchecked government overreach.

The app allows agents to snap a photo of a suspect’s face with their phone and quickly pull up the person’s name, location, social media history — and sometimes their immigration status.

“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 spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, said in a statement.

Agency officials said that the app has been used over 100,000 times so far, helping speed up arrests and leading to fewer instances of people with legal status being detained.

Mobile Fortify was developed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection during President Joe Biden’s term, adapting technology already in use at U.S. ports of entry. Initially, it was only used by Border Patrol agents operating near the southern border.

But its use has expanded under Trump, who has vowed to undertake the largest deportation program in American history. And, now that Congress has allocated an additional $75 billion to ICE — making it the most-funded law enforcement agency in the nation — it has the bandwidth to experiment with and broadly implement new technologies. [MORE]