ICE and CBP's Face-Recognition App Can't Actually Verify Who People Are

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https://www.wired.com/story/cbp-ice-dhs-mobile-fortify-face-recognition-verify-identity/

ICE and CBP’s Face-Recognition App Can’t Actually Verify Who People Are

Dell Cameron
Maddy Varner
Feb 5, 2026

ICE has used Mobile Fortify to identify immigrants and citizens alike over 100,000 times, by one estimate. It wasn't built to work like that—and only got approved after DHS abandoned its own privacy rules.

THE FACE-RECOGNITION APP Mobile Fortify, now used by United States immigration agents in towns and cities across the US, is not designed to reliably identify people in the streets and was deployed without the scrutiny that has historically governed the rollout of technologies that impact people’s privacy, according to records reviewed by WIRED.

The Department of Homeland Security launched Mobile Fortify in the spring of 2025 to “determine or verify” the identities of individuals stopped or detained by DHS officers during federal operations, records show. DHS explicitly linked the rollout to an executive order, signed by President Donald Trump on his first day in office, which called for a “total and efficient” crackdown on undocumented immigrants through the use of expedited removals, expanded detention, and funding pressure on states, among other tactics.

Despite DHS repeatedly framing Mobile Fortify as a tool for identifying people through facial recognition, however, the app does not actually “verify” the identities of people stopped by federal immigration agents—a well-known limitation of the technology and a function of how Mobile Fortify is designed and used.

"Every manufacturer of this technology, every police department with a policy makes very clear that face recognition technology is not capable of providing a positive identification, that it makes mistakes, and that it's only for generating leads," says Nathan Wessler, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

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