#mobile fortify

DHS built a face scanning app. You might already be in it.

They came to his workplace armed with guns, gas canisters and artificial intelligence. He fought back with his quick wit and street smarts.

What happened next is a preview of what routine face scans could look like on American streets, in this special France 24–Mother Jones report.

Abdikafi Abdurahman Abdullahi, known as Kafi, is one of the few people willing to speak publicly about being subjected to the Department of Homeland Security’s new facial recognition tool, Mobile Fortify.

The Somali-American engineer-turned-Uber driver was waiting for a fare in an airport rideshare lot on January 7th, just hours after Renee Good was shot and killed by federal agents. As he watched a video of her death on his phone, there was a knock on his car door. Outside stood roughly a dozen ICE agents, demanding proof of his citizenship.

Kafi, who is Black and Muslim, refused to show his ID, arguing he was being racially profiled. Instead, he began filming, and his unflappable, mischievous comebacks transformed his video into a viral sensation.

The Department of Homeland Security officially acknowledged the existence of Mobile Fortify in January. But by then it had already been used over 100,000 times in American communities, according to recent court filings.

After taking someone’s picture, an ICE agent can now scan for that person’s face or fingerprints in a host of government databases that reportedly include more than 200 million images. The agent will immediately obtain vast amounts of information on that person, including name and date of birth, possible citizenship status, names of family members, markers like alien registration numbers and much more.

ICE is reportedly using the app on people it suspects of being in the country without authorization, but this presumption comes with its own host of problems. (ICE is also believed to be scanning random people of color on the streets to determine citizenship.) Representative Bennie G Thompson, the ranking member of the House homeland security committee, told 404Media that ICE considers “an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify [to be] a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship – including a birth certificate – if the app says the person is an alien”.

Everyday Americans may soon want to consider face coverings for reasons far beyond health or fashion. Our Constitution guarantees a right to privacy, yet that right is being steadily eroded by the Trump administration’s expanding surveillance powers. ICE has quietly introduced a new mobile app called Mobile Fortify, a tool that allows agents to scan a person’s face or take contactless fingerprints directly from a smartphone. The app connects in real time to massive federal biometric databases, including those used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, to verify identity and immigration status instantly.

Leaked internal documents reveal that the app can cross-reference a captured image against hundreds of millions of stored photos in systems like the Traveler Verification Service and the Automated Biometric Identification System, databases originally designed for border control but now deployed deep inside the country. If the algorithm flags someone as “not a U.S. citizen,” agents can override traditional proof of citizenship, even something as official as a birth certificate, in favor of whatever the system reports. And those scanned have no right to refuse, including U.S. citizens.

What makes this especially alarming is the system’s reach and permanence. Mobile Fortify is capable of storing facial images and fingerprint scans for up to 15 years, regardless of a person’s immigration or citizenship status. Each scan can pull up personal data (photo, date of birth, nationality) and even logs GPS coordinates of where the scan occurred. ICE has provided almost no details about how errors are handled or whether individuals are notified of false matches, and there’s no clear policy limiting who can access or share that data once it’s collected.

Lisa Needham at Daily Kos:

The Trump administration has given Immigration and Customs Enforcement an absolutely staggering amount of money to hurt immigrants, and they’re not letting it go to waste.  Fortunately for ICE—but unfortunately for everyone else—tech companies are happily playing their part in building a truly dystopian society, one where you are always under the administration’s gaze.  According to 404 Media, ICE is using a facial recognition app to identify people, including citizens. Videos show ICE agents stopping random kids on bikes and people in cars and, if they don’t have or refuse to provide identification, they point their little cellphones at them to scan their faces. 

The outlet wasn’t able to confirm which app ICE is using, but in the past they’ve used Mobile Fortify, which contains 200 million images as well as data from the State Department, Customs and Border Patrol, the FBI, and state records. A scan of someone’s face returns detailed information, including name, date of birth, nationality, and immigration status.  This sounds a lot like ICE now has the power to stop anyone they want for no particular reason and demand they submit to biometric screening to prove they’re a citizen. And if they aren’t, they’re presumably arrested. You’ll note in this grand plan that there’s nothing about the probable cause ICE has to stop people with this high-tech version of “papers, please.” Indeed, it looks a lot like ICE simply profiles people and then subjects them to a search. Because that’s exactly what scanning your face after detaining you is: a search. 

Because we have the Fourth Amendment, searches are supposed to be based on a reasonable, particularized suspicion. In other words, law enforcement officers are supposed to have a specific, reasonable concern about a specific person or persons before stopping them. Otherwise, officers could just stop anyone at any time for any reason. Okay, well, we did have a Fourth Amendment. In September, the conservatives on the Supreme Court decided it’s A-OK to racially profile Hispanic people, considering things like the language they speak, their accent, where they're located, and what type of work they do.  The majority didn’t bother to explain their reasoning, but we can all thank Justice Brett Kavanaugh for his smug concurrence describing how this would work in practice. 

“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go,” he wrote. Do they, Brett? Do they?  What about the more than 170 citizens who have been detained by ICE? What about Maria Greeley, a U.S. citizen born in Illinois, who was stopped by federal agents and told that she didn’t look like she should have the last name Greeley, presumably because she’s Latina and a service worker? Those agents grabbed her, zip-tied her hands, and detained her based on their racist ideas about what kinds of last names immigrants should have.