Federal immigration officers often use facial recognition technology to identify immigrants in the field.Now, a newly revealed document from the Department of Homeland Security outlines plans to give local police working on its behalf the same type of technology.The document, first reported earlier this month by the tech news outlet 404 media, is a Privacy Threshold Analysis, which is essentially a federal report assessing whether the privacy implications of a tool warrant further government study.The tool in question is a mobile app called the ICE Task Force Module, which allows local police to scan the faces of people they stop in their communities.The app then compares the facial scan against more than 250 million government records.
Those include the State Department's Visa records and records from the Traveler Verification Service, used by the Transportation Security Administration at airports to verify identities on international flights.Once police scan a person's face, the app then instructs an officer either to "not detain or arrest," or it gives the officer a reference code to use to obtain more information from ICE.The photos captured by the app are then stored in an internal DHS system for 15 years, the document states.DHS declined to provide NPR with more insight about the app and how it is used.In a statement, the agency said ICE is committed to ensuring that the local police who partner with them have the tools needed to support ICE's mass deportation mission.Those local officers, called "ICE non-federal law enforcement officers" in the document, are likely participants in the federal 287(g) program.
A subset of that program, the Task Force Model, gives local police the authority to arrest immigrants on ICE's behalf during their routine police duties.There are around 1,300 police agencies participating in the Task Force Model nationwide.The DHS analysis "raises more questions than I think it answers," says Clare Garvie, deputy director of the Techn...