NEWARK, NEW JERSEY — Immigration and Customs Enforcement has deployed a mobile facial recognition application, the ICE Task Force Module, which allows local police to scan individuals during community stops. The application compares facial scans against a database of over 250 million government records, and photographs captured by the app are retained for 15 years within a Department of Homeland Security internal system.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has plans to provide local police, who collaborate with federal immigration authorities, access to facial recognition technology. The mobile application, which launched in September of last year, directs officers to either proceed without detention or provides a reference code for additional information from Immigration and Customs Enforcement after a scan. Law enforcement officers conducting immigration enforcement scans do not have prior knowledge of an individual's citizenship status before initiating a scan. According to a DHS official document, "It is conceivable that a photo taken by an ICE non-federal law enforcement officer using the TFM mobile application could be that of someone other than a removable individual, including U.S. citizens." The DHS stated that, like other law enforcement agencies, it "employs various forms of technology to investigate criminal activity and support law enforcement efforts while respecting civil liberties and privacy interests."

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin stated during a congressional hearing that the department has used facial recognition technology on demonstrators. Mullin said the agency identified individuals who attended protests in Oregon and later participated in demonstrations outside the Delaney Hall Detention Facility. Former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Todd Lyons indicated in a letter to members of Congress that the agency grants itself broad authority to collect information from individuals encountered by officers.

Patrick Eddington, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, discussed the broader implications of the technology. "This kind of technology which can impact individual rights, when it's scaled, it can have potentially very, very large effects affecting lots and lots of people. It's like a Bill of Rights disaster pretty much waiting to happen," Eddington said.

Cooper Quintin, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, questioned the necessity of the databases used by the app. "This app wouldn't work if they didn't have databases to pull people's pictures from and compare against. They're playing semantics. They're certainly not being forthright," Quintin said.