Three advocacy groups argue that federal immigration authorities now lean on biometric identification as the connective tissue of a much larger surveillance system — one that increasingly touches U.S. citizens, bystanders and people simply exercising their right to protest.
That's the central claim of a new report titled The Tech Behind ICE: Oligarchs, Immigration Enforcement and the Threat to Democracy, co-published this week by Mijente, Just Futures Law and the Surveillance Resistance Lab. According to coverage in Biometric Update, the coalition contends the Department of Homeland Security has pushed identity-verification technology out of airports and detention facilities and into routine street encounters nationwide. Its authors say what makes the expansion dangerous isn't any single app or camera — it's how face images, fingerprints, iris scans and DNA now feed into a much wider lattice of government records and privately held consumer data.
A Phone That Doubles as a Federal Database
The report's flagship example is Mobile Fortify, a smartphone application built by NEC that lets ICE and CBP officers photograph a person's face, lift fingerprints and scan identification documents directly in the field. Those captures get checked against Customs and Border Protection systems holding hundreds of millions of biometric entries — a scale DHS itself has acknowledged by labeling the tool a "high-impact" AI application.
The coalition's report — echoing a lawsuit Illinois and the City of Chicago filed in January 2026 — says agents have used the app more than 100,000 times since its rollout, with captured biometric data held in federal systems for fifteen years regardless of how any individual encounter ends. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, has said ICE officials told lawmakers that a Mobile Fortify match counts as a "definitive" determination of someone's status — meaning agents can disregard proof of citizenship, birth certificate included.
The report also catalogs the tool's reach past its intended target population: legal observers monitoring enforcement in Minnesota and Illinois say they were photographed along with their cars; a lawsuit out of Maine accuses DHS of using the app to intimidate people who filmed ICE arrests; and Chicago incidents allegedly included agents scanning minors' faces without asking. DHS still hasn't published a formal usage policy despite repeated congressional requests, the report notes.
DHS has not stayed silent on the broader Mobile Fortify criticism, even if it may not have responded to this specific report by publication time. Responding to the Illinois lawsuit's near-identical claims, a DHS spokesperson told CNN in January that the app is "a lawful law-enforcement tool" governed by "strict limits on data access, use, and retention," adding that it "has not been blocked, restricted, or curtailed by the courts." That denial is worth weighing against the report's account.
Clearview AI and the Data It Wasn't Given
The report's other central concern is Clearview AI, whose own marketing now claims a database exceeding 70 billion facial images scraped from sites including Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn and Venmo — collected, the report says, without the knowledge of the people pictured. ICE's Homeland Security Investigations division signed a contract with the company worth up to $9.2 million in September 2025, structured to support child-exploitation and officer-assault investigations; CBP followed with a separate one-year, $225,000 deal in February 2026. The report frames the pattern as a deepening reliance on a vendor already facing privacy lawsuits and multimillion-dollar fines from regulators overseas.
Beyond these two flagship systems, the report counts 238 AI applications logged department-wide as of 2025, more than half of them run by ICE or CBP, plus upward of 60 more sitting on an internal list that's never been made public. More than 25 of the department's programs specifically involve capturing or matching faces — 22 of those under ICE or CBP — with close to half tied to CBP's Traveler Verification Service, which screens travelers entering or leaving the country.
Smart Glasses, an Analytics Engine and a Bigger Budget Ask
Looking ahead, the report flags a fiscal 2027 funding request that includes $16 million for biometrics and identity management, $6 million earmarked for "biometric emerging concepts," and another $10 million for biometric screening — plus a prototype for smart glasses designed to identify people mid-operation. It also spotlights RAVEn, an ICE analytics system that pulls together surveillance footage, biometric records, social media activity, commercial location data and license-plate reader logs. Its facial-matching function can reportedly compare mugshots, security-camera stills or images pulled from a seized phone against driver's-license photo databases — without notifying whoever is being searched.
Iris Scanning: A Bigger Story Than the Report Captures
The report also raises iris recognition, pointing to a $4.6 million, sole-source contract ICE awarded BI2 Technologies in September 2025 to supply roughly 200 handheld iris-scanning devices, plus ongoing access to a private database of arrest and booking records. The report questions why the deal wasn't competitively bid and points to BI2's lobbying of the department as a possible explanation.
That $4.6 million figure, however, is no longer the current state of play — and this is where the report's snapshot has already been overtaken by events. In May 2026, ICE finalized a second, far larger no-bid contract with BI2 worth roughly $25 million, expanding the device order nearly eightfold to 1,570 units and giving ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations division standing access to more than five million booking records covering an estimated 1.5 million people. The newer deal also skipped the federal government's standard cloud-security review process and, according to procurement filings, includes no requirement for independent audits or congressional notice. A reader relying on the report alone would come away thinking the iris-scanning rollout tops out at 200 devices and $4.6 million — when the program had, in fact, already grown to roughly five times that dollar figure and nearly eight times the device count by the time the report was published.
A System Built Faster Than Its Oversight
Taken as a whole, the report argues DHS has scaled biometric surveillance far faster than it has built any guardrails around it, describing an agency that largely investigates itself. Its authors are calling for mandatory consent before any biometric capture, firm limits on how long collected data can be stored or shared, public disclosure of surveillance-related contracts, and tighter rules governing data exchanges between government agencies and private vendors.
