Meta's smart glasses: border agents wear them on raids, and Meta licensed police-and-Pentagon face recognition for them

Border agents have worn Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses on immigration raids: a CBP agent at a June 30, 2025 raid outside a Home Depot in Los Angeles, and a Border Patrol agent in Charlotte, North Carolina, with the recording light on (reported Dec. 9, 2025). CBP told 404 Media it has no arrangement with Meta and doesn't allow employees to use personal recording devices.

Meta has been building face recognition into the same glasses. An internal Meta document from May 2025, reported by The New York Times in February 2026, planned to launch the feature, called "Name Tag," "during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns." In April 2026, 75 groups including the ACLU and EPIC asked Meta to drop it, warning it is "primed to be coopted for police surveillance, circumventing the Fourth Amendment," and asked Meta to disclose any discussions with ICE and CBP. In June 2026, WIRED found the face-recognition code already inside the Meta AI app, downloaded over 50 million times, built to pull faceprints from Meta's servers. EFF confirmed it and found it removed in a June 5 update. Meta says nothing has shipped to consumers and it is "not building a central face database."

The face recognition Meta tested came from Rank One Computing, which gets about 80 percent of its revenue from government clients. It sells to the U.S. Marshals Service, the Navy's police force (NCIS) and police departments, and built long-range face recognition for U.S. Special Operations Command. Its CEO previously ran the FBI division that operates the bureau's biometric databases. A Rank One license obtained by WIRED, covering up to 10 million face templates, is tied to a test version of the Meta AI app, and traces of the integration shipped, dormant, to consumers in June 2026. Meta declined to say why it licensed the software or whether the relationship continues.

A class action filed March 4, 2026 alleges that footage from the glasses' AI features goes to Meta's servers and is reviewed by contract workers in Kenya (N.D. Cal. No. 3:26-cv-01897, now In re Meta AI Glasses Litigation).

How we know: Agents' use is from photos and video verified by 404 Media. The face-recognition code is WIRED's finding, reproduced by EFF. The Kenya review is the class action's allegation.