Mobile Fortify: ICE and CBP's face-scanning phone app

Agents point a phone at a face, and the app matches it against government records, including about 200 million images, according to internal ICE material 404 Media viewed. DHS's 2025 AI use case inventory names the vendor: "NEC is the third‑party vendor CBP uses. ICE accesses these capabilities through CBP and does not contract directly with NEC." Illinois and Chicago allege in a lawsuit that DHS launched it around June 2025 and has used it more than 100,000 times. Civil liberties groups say the data, including photos of US citizens, is stored for 15 years. A CBP official testified that the app returned two different, incorrect names for a woman detained in Oregon (404 Media). Separately, Jesus Gutiérrez, a US citizen, told Reveal that agents scanned his face after stopping him on his way home from a Chicago gym.

How we know: DHS's 2025 AI use case inventory and the linked reporting read directly (Oct 3, 2026). Partially verified: the 200 million figure comes from internal ICE material 404 Media viewed and may be a dated lower bound; the 100,000 figure is a lawsuit's allegation. Corrected Oct 3, 2026: an earlier version merged two cases into "misidentifications of US citizens."