DHS’s Mobile Fortify: Facial Recognition App Deployed Without Proper Oversight or Reliability

The Department of Homeland Security’s facial recognition app Mobile Fortify, launched in 2025, has been deployed across the United States with minimal oversight and questionable reliability, raising serious privacy and civil liberties concerns.

Questionable Technology and Implementation

Despite DHS framing Mobile Fortify as an identity verification tool, records reveal the app does not actually verify identities. Instead, it generates candidate matches rather than confirmations. The technology, licensed from NEC Corporation of America, is known to perform poorly in uncontrolled environments – precisely the conditions in which immigration agents use it on the streets.

Testimony from agents indicates the app has produced different identities for the same person, with no confidence scores provided to indicate match reliability. Agents have used these uncertain results as part of probable cause determinations, sometimes based on factors like speaking Spanish or appearance.

Dismantled Privacy Protections

The Trump administration has systematically removed safeguards that previously limited facial recognition use:

• A 2023 directive prohibiting facial recognition as the sole basis for enforcement disappeared from DHS’s website shortly after Trump’s inauguration
• Centralized privacy reviews were dismantled
• Department-wide limits on facial recognition were quietly removed
• Changes were overseen by Roman Jankowski, a former Heritage Foundation lawyer and Project 2025 contributor

Expanding Surveillance Infrastructure

Mobile Fortify’s primary function appears to be expanding DHS’s biometric data collection beyond border checkpoints to routine encounters throughout the country. The collected data is stored in multiple databases:

• Automated Targeting System (ATS) – central platform linking various databases
• Traveler Verification System (TVS) – used at ports of entry
• Seizure and Apprehension Workflow (SAW) – stores “derogatory information”
• Fortify the Border Hotlist – purpose and criteria undisclosed

Data collected through these systems may be retained for 15 years or longer, with fingerprint data kept for at least 75 years.

Civil Liberties Concerns

Reports indicate Mobile Fortify has been used to scan faces of US citizens, protesters, and bystanders. Senator Ed Markey has warned that DHS officials have suggested building a database to catalog people who protest or observe immigration enforcement.

Critics, including the ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation, argue that the app gives “a veneer of certainty when there isn’t certainty behind the scenes” and that DHS may be exceeding its authority with these interior enforcement activities.

Legislative Response

Senator Markey and colleagues have introduced the “ICE Out of Our Faces Act” aimed at prohibiting ICE and CBP from using certain facial-recognition and biometric surveillance tools, calling the current implementation “dangerous, authoritarian, and unconstitutional.”