Two ICE agents film the press using smartphones in the hallway outside the immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza in New York USA on July 11 2025. The Department of Homeland Security has been acquiring new tools to identify people and monitor them.
Madison Swart /Hans Lucas via AFP/Getty Images
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Madison Swart /Hans Lucas via AFP/Getty Images
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is acquiring powerful new surveillance tools to identify and monitor people.
They include apps that let federal agents point a cell phone at someone’s face to potentially identify them and determine their immigration status in the field, and another that can scan irises. Newly licensed software can give “access to vast amounts of location-based data,” according to an archive of the website of the company that developed it, and ICE recently revived a previously frozen contract with a company that makes spyware that can hack into cell phones.
The federal agency is also ramping up its social media surveillance, with new AI-driven software contracts, and is considering hiring 24/7 teams of contractors assigned to scouring various databases and platforms like Facebook and TikTok and creating dossiers on users.
The Trump administration is seeking to employ new technology as it tries to boost deportations to a million a year, a target that could be helped with tech to identify and locate noncitizens subject to removal.
Some Democratic members of Congress are raising legal concerns about the new technologies and are asking questions of ICE that are going unanswered. A group of U.S. senators have called on ICE to stop using a mobile facial recognition app.
“Americans have a right to walk through public spaces without being surveilled,” Democratic Sen. Edward Markey of Mass. told NPR.
Privacy and civil liberties advocates also warn these surveillance tools represent a grave threat and say there is not a sufficient regulatory framework in place or oversight to ensure federal agents are using new technologies in a way that protects privacy and constitutional rights.
“Immigration powers are being used to justify mass surveillance of everybody,” said Emily Tucker, the executive director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law.
“The purpose of this is to build up a massive surveillance apparatus that can be used for whatever kind of policing the people in power decide that they want to undertake,” she said.
Scanning Teens’ Faces
The way ICE and Border Patrol agents use these technologies was on display in a video posted to TikTok last month by an account in Aurora, Ill. The video appears to show a group of masked Border Patrol agents as they jump out of an SUV and approach two young people on bikes on the sidewalk near East Aurora High School. The agents ask them their citizenship and to show ID.
One of the young men, who is filming the incident and does not appear on camera, says he is 16 and is a U.S. citizen but does not have an ID.
“Can you do facial?” an officer is heard asking. Another officer then takes out a cell phone and points it as if taking a photo. He then asks the young person’s name and the video ends shortly after that.
The person who posted the video did not respond to a message but said in comments on the post that the video was of their cousins. NPR was able to verify the location where the video was shot.
It is not clear which app the officer used. ICE has a mobile facial recognition app known as Mobile Fortify that uses images of people’s faces and fingerprints to try to identify people in the field. A Department of Homeland Security document says the app searches for matches against Customs and Border Protection databases, including photos taken when people enter and exit the U.S., and can return information like a subject’s name, birth date, alien number, possible citizenship status and “Possible Overstay Status.”
In another section of the document, it says ICE will receive “limited biographic data” if the individual matches a photo from a specific list of targets, called the “Fortify the Border Hotlist,” and non-matches “will not return any additional information.”
It also says individuals cannot decline to be photographed, and that photos are stored for 15 years, even if there is no match.
The existence of the app and documentation on how it works were both first reported by 404 Media, which obtained the DHS document through a Freedom of Information Act request.
This week, the outlet also reported that Customs and Border Protection made a different facial recognition app, Mobile Identify, available on Google’s app store for state and local law enforcement agencies that are deputized to work with ICE.
