Prevent ICE From Becoming a Roving Biometric Police Force

ICE’s Deployment of Mobile Facial Recognition Technology I urge you to publicly speak out, introduce legislation, and hold immediate oversight hearings regarding ICE’s use of the facial recognition and biometric app known as Mobile Fortify. This app grants ICE agents real-time access to over 200 million images from federal and state databases - without congressional authorization and with virtually no transparency or privacy protections. Serious Privacy and Civil Liberties Concerns According to reporting from Wired and 404 Media, Mobile Fortify enables agents to instantly scan a person’s face or fingerprints using a phone camera and retrieve highly sensitive personal data such as name, citizenship, immigration status, and date of birth. The images are pulled from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, State Department, and others. Civil rights advocates, including the ACLU, warn this unchecked technology is highly susceptible to bias, frequently misidentifies people of color, and has been deployed without the consent of Congress or the American public. Surveillance Without Oversight Is Dangerous This app transforms ICE agents into mobile biometric scanners, enabling widespread surveillance and enforcement actions in the absence of due process. There is no meaningful mechanism for redress in cases of misidentification, no disclosure of who is being searched, and no limit on how this tool may evolve. These concerns demand immediate action. What Congress Must Do Now I respectfully urge you to take three concrete steps: • Issue a public statement condemning ICE’s deployment of real-time biometric surveillance tools without congressional oversight. • Introduce legislation to prohibit the use of facial recognition and biometric data by federal agencies without explicit statutory authority. The bill should include mandatory privacy safeguards, public reporting, strict data retention policies, and a formal process for individuals to contest false matches. • Hold public oversight hearings to investigate the use, scope, accuracy, and legal basis of the Mobile Fortify system, as well as the risk it poses to civil liberties and constitutional protections. A Line Must Be Drawn Now Without firm congressional leadership, ICE’s use of this tool will continue to degrade individual privacy, increase racial profiling, and bypass the checks and balances essential to a free society. We must not allow mass biometric surveillance to become normalized in federal law enforcement without a democratic process and firm legal constraints.