ICE and CBP Agents Are Scanning Peoples’ Faces on the Street To Verify Citizenship
Videos on social media show officers from ICE and CBP using facial recognition technology on people in the field. One expert described the practice as “pure dystopian creep.”
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ICE and CBP Agents Are Scanning Peoples’ Faces on the Street To Verify Citizenship
Joseph Cox
Oct 29, 2025 at 10:40 AM
“You don’t got no ID?” a Border Patrol agent in a baseball cap, sunglasses, and neck gaiter asks a kid on a bike. The officer and three others had just stopped the two young men on their bikes during the day in what a video documenting the incident says is Chicago. One of the boys is filming the encounter on his phone. He says in the video he was born here, meaning he would be an American citizen.
When the boy says he doesn’t have ID on him, the Border Patrol officer has an alternative. He calls over to one of the other officers, “can you do facial?” The second officer then approaches the boy, gets him to turn around to face the sun, and points his own phone camera directly at him, hovering it over the boy’s face for a couple seconds. The officer then looks at his phone’s screen and asks for the boy to verify his name. The video stops.
In another video of a different incident, this time filmed from the perspective of a driver that authorities have also apparently stopped in Chicago, a group of ICE officers surround the driver side window. One of the officers, wearing a vest from Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), tells one of his coworkers the driver is refusing to be ID’d. The second ICE official then points his own phone camera at the driver.
“I’m an American citizen so leave me alone,” the driver says.
“Alright, we just got to verify that,” one of the officers says, with some of the group peering at the phone. The officer with the phone points the camera at the driver again, and asks him to remove his hat. “If you could take your hat off, it would be a lot quicker,” the ICE officer says. “I’m going to run your information.”
These videos and others reviewed by 404 Media show that ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are actively using smartphone facial recognition technology in the field, including in stops that seem to have little justification beyond the color of someone’s skin, to then look up more information on that person, including their identity and potentially their immigration status. It is not clear which specific app the officers in the videos are using. 404 Media previously revealed ICE has a new app called Mobile Fortify, which scans someone’s face and is built on a database of 200 million images. The app queries an unprecedented number of government databases to return the subject’s name, date of birth, alien number, and whether they’ve been given an order of deportation.
The videos are evidence that the more high tech ambitions of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign are now a reality. While many ICE operations have been distinctly lowtech, such as simply targeting brown people at a Home Depot parking lot, it is now clear that ICE’s investment in facial recognition technology is an option for officers who are pulling people over or targeting them.
“From these videos it seems like ICE has started using live face recognition in the field,” Allison McDonald, assistant professor of computing & data science at Boston University, told 404 Media in an email. McDonald previously worked on a Georgetown Law, Center on Privacy & Technology report into ICE’s data-driven deportation strategy.
A screenshot of one of the videos, via X.
“The growing use of face recognition by ICE shows us two things: that we should have banned government use of face recognition when we had the chance because it is dangerous, invasive, and an inherent threat to civil liberties and that any remaining pretense that ICE is harassing and surveilling people in any kind of ‘precise’ way should be left in the dust,” Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told 404 Media in an email.
404 Media has seen several videos across social media that appear to show immigration authorities using facial recognition technology. Often the videos include little context beyond what is happening directly in front of the camera, but do sometimes include officials making explicit references to the technology, like with the Border Patrol officer who asked “can you do facial?”
In another video from earlier this year filmed in New Mexico, a group of ICE and Border Patrol agents stand on and near a porch. “Technology, man, huh,” one of the two subjects the agents are surrounding says. One of the Border Patrol agents looks at their phone, while another walks up and squarely points their phone’s camera at another subject’s face. For a brief moment the video shows the officer has the camera app, or another app using the camera, open.
The caption of the video claims “After conducting a search and subsequently arresting individuals at a local horse training facility, authorities then went to nearby residences for further searches and citizenship verification. Identifications were verified utilizing biometrics (facial recognition).”
A local news report about the incident quotes Efren Aguilar Jr., a resident of the property and a U.S. citizen, as saying “They asked if we lived here, we said ‘yes.’ They asked for documentation and if we were U.S. citizens, and we said ‘yes.’ And then they wanted us to let them go into our house, that’s when we refused.” Aguilar told the local media outlet that other colleagues were arrested.
