ICE's New Surveillance State Isn't Tracking Only Immigrants [View all]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/opinion/ice-surveillance.html

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Last April the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement pledged to run the agency with the ruthless efficiency of Amazon. Mass deportations, he said, should be “like Prime but with human beings.”

What followed has been anything but logistically impressive. But one feature of President Trump’s crackdown on immigration does seem beamed in from a seamless law-enforcement future: the suddenly ubiquitous use of facial recognition technology to identify not just those whom federal agents suspect are in the country illegally but also those who are protesting, interrupting or simply documenting the nationwide nativist dragnet.

In video after video recorded by protesters and observers in Minneapolis, you can see that the agents are also filming the observers, in a sort of mutual surveillance state, I wrote last month (and one that my colleague Tressie McMillan Cottom covered this week). But in truth, it isn’t really mutual. The Department of Homeland Security has tried to criminalize journalism by characterizing reporting as doxxing and observing as impeding law enforcement, and its agents are now threatening and sometimes assaulting people who record them — an effort to secure, in addition to the state’s monopoly on violence, a monopoly on surveillance. This may be another reason so many immigration officers are masked while on duty: They know better than we do what it means to show one’s face. In Minneapolis and elsewhere, agents now carry tools of surveillance into the field, just as they do their guns.

The most prominent of these phone-based facial recognition apps is Mobile Fortify, which ICE has claimed can deliver a definitive determination of someone’s immigration status but has already bungled IDs. As Joseph Cox of 404 Media reported, it has even identified the same woman as two people, neither of whom was her; the outlet also reported that local law enforcement officers working with the Department of Homeland Security use a different product, Mobile Identify.

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