The lethal force Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is meting out on American streets is rightly drawing loud condemnations from politicians and editorial boards across the nation and around the world. Now is the time we must start paying attention to another highly damaging part of ICE’s arsenal: the agency’s deployment of mass surveillance.

I’m referring specifically to Mobile Fortify, a specialized app ICE has been using at least since May 2025. (Usage of the app was first reported last June by 404Media.) What is Mobile Fortify? It’s an app for facial recognition that can additionally take “contactless fingerprints” of someone simply by snapping a picture of a person’s fingers. The app has been used more than 100,000 times, including on children, as alleged in a lawsuit filed by the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago. And it’s dangerous.

After taking someone’s picture, an ICE agent can now scan for that person’s face or fingerprints in a host of government databases that reportedly include more than 200 million images. The agent will immediately obtain vast amounts of information on that person, including name and date of birth, possible citizenship status, names of family members, markers like alien registration numbers and much more.

ICE is reportedly using the app on people it suspects of being in the country without authorization, but this presumption comes with its own host of problems. (ICE is also believed to be scanning random people of color on the streets to determine citizenship.) Representative Bennie G Thompson, the ranking member of the House homeland security committee, told 404Media that ICE considers “an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify [to be] a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship – including a birth certificate – if the app says the person is an alien”.

It gets worse. In a document obtained by 404Media, the government admits that “it is........

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