Congress Must Halt ICE’s Use of Flawed Facial Recognition and Surveillance Apps

I am writing to urge you to immediately intervene to prevent the continued use and expansion of surveillance and biometric enforcement tools by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that threaten privacy, due process, and civil liberties—and that have already been shown to make serious mistakes. ICE is currently deploying a facial-recognition application known as Mobile Fortify during enforcement operations far from ports of entry. According to sworn testimony and documents obtained through public records requests, ICE and CBP officers use this app to scan individuals’ faces against vast government databases and have treated its results as “definitive” determinations of immigration status—even instructing officers to disregard documentary proof such as birth certificates. This is deeply alarming, particularly because the technology is demonstrably unreliable. In one documented enforcement action, the same individual was scanned twice by Mobile Fortify and incorrectly identified as two entirely different people. Despite this, the individual was detained and transported based on app-generated results alone. When questioned in court, ICE officers could not state the app’s accuracy rate. These tools are not used in controlled environments. They are deployed during raids and street encounters, often involving handcuffed individuals who are unable to meaningfully consent or opt out. ICE has acknowledged that people are not permitted to refuse biometric scans. Errors under these conditions are not hypothetical—they are inevitable. In parallel, ICE has also deployed a separate analytics and targeting system—commonly referred to as ELITE—that aggregates personal data to guide enforcement operations and raids. Taken together, these systems amount to a dragnet surveillance architecture that operates with little transparency, limited oversight, and no meaningful mechanism for individuals to challenge or correct errors before their liberty is restricted. Facial recognition technology is widely documented to produce higher error rates for women and people of color. Using such tools as a basis for detention, interrogation, or removal—without judicial review or verified accuracy—violates fundamental principles of due process and privacy. No agency should be permitted to outsource life-altering decisions to opaque and unproven software. Congress has both the authority and the obligation to act. Legislation has already been introduced to restrict the use of mobile biometric tools to ports of entry, mandate the deletion of biometric data collected from U.S. citizens, and prohibit the sharing of these applications with state or local law enforcement. These safeguards are necessary—but urgent. I respectfully urge Congress to: • Immediately suspend ICE’s use of mobile facial recognition and predictive enforcement apps outside ports of entry • Prohibit treating biometric matches as dispositive evidence of legal status • Require full disclosure of accuracy rates, error rates, and bias testing • Mandate the deletion of improperly collected biometric data • Advance and pass legislation that places enforceable limits on DHS surveillance technologies Border security and immigration enforcement must not come at the expense of constitutional rights. Technology that cannot reliably identify people should never be used to deprive them of liberty.