ICE agents reveal daily arrest quotas and surveillance app in rare court testimony

[groundloop]

Source: The Guardian

US immigration agents in Oregon used a custom-made app to identify neighborhoods and people to target, and had daily arrest quotas they sought to meet during operations, courtroom testimony has revealed.

Details about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers' surveillance tools and arrest goals in the state have come to light in a federal lawsuit that compelled officers to answer questions under oath, offering a rare window into opaque, internal strategies that are generally kept secret and have been driving mass detentions and chaotic raids.
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Testimony in a December hearing in the case provided a remarkable acknowledgment by an ICE officer of how daily target arrest numbers played out at the local level, and appeared to contradict the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials' repeated claims that officers didn't have quotas. Trump adviser Stephen Miller has publicly said the administration's target was 3,000 daily arrests. The hearing also appeared to be the first time that ICE disclosed in court its use of an app called Elite for operations.

[.....]

JB acknowledged information generated by Elite could be inaccurate: "The app could say 100%, and it's wrong. The person doesn't live there. And so it's not accurate. It's a tool that we use that gives you probability, but there's ... no such thing as 100%." Officers have to do "checks" on the intelligence, he said.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/13/ice-agent-court-testimony-oregon

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Read the entire article, there's far too much information to share in just 4 paragraphs.

[xocetaceans]

1. So, they have two apps "Elite" (for locations) and "Mobile Fortify" (for facial recognition), and in case of doubts, ...

..., the agents seem to default to a setting possibly described by the phrase "It's not our problem to be correct.": see below.

ICE agents reveal daily arrest quotas and surveillance app in rare court testimony
Under oath, officers said they were told to make eight arrests a day and given special tech to help choose ‘targets’

Sam Levin in Portland, Oregon
Fri 13 Mar 2026 09.00 EDT

...

Elite wasn’t the only app ICE used during the operation. Another ICE agent testified that while carrying out the arrests, he photographed a farm worker in the car known as MJMA, who is the lead plaintiff in the case. The agent ran MJMA’s face through Mobile Fortify, DHS’s facial recognition app. The app showed a match, but the officer testified: “I wasn’t sure if it was her or not.”

MJMA had entered the US with a valid temporary visa last year. Still, JB’s team wrote in their arrest records – inaccurately – that the farm worker entered the US unlawfully. The report also inaccurately described the stop of the van as “consensual”, the judge noted. MJMA was taken to a detention center in Washington state before ICE released her “without explanation and left her to find her own way back home to Oregon”.

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/13/ice-agent-court-testimony-oregon

That is an important article. Thanks for posting it.