The US federal government has announced that it will “immediately” equip all its Homeland Security officers in Minneapolis with body-worn cameras, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, with plans to outfit all federal officers nationwide.

The announcement follows criticisms in response to ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers who killed two protesters last month in Minneapolis. The initiative to require federal law enforcement officers to wear body cameras has bipartisan support and is popular among the public.

But will body cameras effect change?

Research on the efficacy of body cameras is inconsistent. In 2018, a Bureau of Justice Statistics report outlined the primary reasons cited for law enforcement use of body cameras. These included increasing the quality of evidence, decreasing civilian complaints, reducing agency liability, and enhancing officer safety. However, according to a January 2022 National Institute of Justice report, the “research does not necessarily support the effectiveness of body-worn cameras in achieving those desired outcomes. A comprehensive review of 70 studies of body-worn cameras showed no consistent or no statistically significant effects.” Nevertheless, in May 2022 then-President Joe Biden signed an executive order expanding body cameras to federal law enforcement officers.

Will federal body camera footage be manipulated by AI for release? We can no longer be certain.

Why would President Biden sign an order to expand an otherwise inconsistent technology to law enforcement when acknowledged as such by his own government agency? The answer is because the promise of body cameras is based mostly on popular beliefs and assumptions even when the evidence does not support that the devices would deliver the results the public desired.

In our new book Police Body-Worn Cameras: Media and the New Discourse of Police Reform, we trace the broader shift in the rationale for body camera adoption to concerns over transparency and accountability. Indeed, “transparency” was cited as the primary reason in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announcement to equip its officers with body cameras.

Transparency is characterized by visibility. However, the release of body camera footage or agreement over what footage necessarily shows can never be assumed.

In October 2025, a judge in Chicago ordered all ICE agents in the city to wear body cameras after reviewing clips of submitted footage from officers who had already been equipped with the devices. In December, in response to a records request of immigration operations in Chicago, ICE reported that it had no body camera footage despite that it had earlier submitted footage. It remains uncertain if the footage will ever be released.

DHS has indicated........

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