DHS tech buildout sparks backlash from Democrats
The Trump administration’s deployment of a wide range of technologies to support its sweeping deportation push and respond to those protesting immigration raids is sparking pushback among Democrats and civil liberties advocates, who fear it may be abusing its power as it launches new tools.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has used funding from President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act to invest in a range of technologies that can be used to track both migrants and U.S. citizens.
DHS has purchased iris scanners, facial recognition software, web and social media scraping tools and even various cell phone tracking technologies among its new tools.
Democratic lawmakers concerned about the surge of new technologies have responded with several bills seeking to rein in the power of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as critics question whether the agency is trampling civil liberties with cutting-edge equipment.
“I think the chief concern is that ICE and DHS are pushing the boundaries of the law and the technologies that they’re using,” Don Bell, policy counsel at The Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight, told The Hill.
“ICE is pushing extremely aggressively to meet the campaign promise of delivering a mass deportation program,” he added. “And so the overarching concern with that is surveillance doesn’t always remain limited to the groups that are being targeted, which is bad in itself. Oftentimes, it ends up being expanded to target other groups.”
ICE officers have used several facial recognition technologies, including the Mobile Fortify app, which can capture facial images, contactless fingerprints and photos of identity documents that are compared to existing records to identify individuals, including to determine whether or not they are citizens.
DHS has also purchased an iris-scanning app that can perform a reading from 10 to 15 inches away.
Also alarming critics are various methods for tracking or even unlocking cell phones. Seperately, ICE has purchased WebLoc and Tangles, two tools from the company Pen-Link used to monitor geolocation data and scrape information from the web and social media.
“Both agencies have built an arsenal of surveillance technologies designed to track and to monitor and to target individual people, both citizens and non citizens alike,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said at a press conference earlier this month. “Facial recognition technology sits at the center of a digital dragnet that has been created in our nation over the past year.”
“This frictionless mass surveillance is the stuff of nightmares, and it raises serious questions about how the Trump administration developed and tested this technology, how often officers are using it, and what happens to the data once it is collected,” he added.
Markey, alongside Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), has introduced legislation that would ban ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) from acquiring and using facial recognition technology and other biometric identification systems, in addition to requiring the deletion of data collected for use in these systems.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) introduced a similar bill in mid-January that would bar DHS from using Mobile Fortify and similar apps except at ports of entry into the U.S. It would also require the agency to destroy images and fingerprints captured through such apps.
“DHS should not be conducting surveillance by experimenting with Americans’ faces and fingerprints in the field—especially with unproven and biased technology,” Thompson said in a statement at the time.
Thompson previously launched an investigation into DHS’s use of Mobile Fortify, asserting in a letter obtained by The Hill that the product was in beta testing, “which raises concerns about its accuracy,” and asking the department for the legal basis for its use. DHS never responded.
Civil rights advocates have pushed back for years against law enforcement’s use of facial recognition software over concerns that the technology is less effective at identifying women and people of color, raising the risks of wrongful arrests and convictions for those groups.
“What we know is that these facial recognition technologies are notoriously bad at identifying faces that aren’t white or male,” noted Alejandra Montoya-Boyer, vice president of the Center for Civil Rights and Technology.
“And so not only is the technology impacting our privacy and being used against people’s consent, it also is core technology that is disproportionately impacting people of color,” she continued.
Civil liberties advocates are also wary of the Trump administration’s use of this new technology in the context of its broader handling of personal information.
“Since the beginning of the new administration, previously existing privacy protections that were bipartisan, had been in place for a long time at federal administrative agencies, have kind of been torn down in an effort to ensure that ICE either has data shared with it or has access to data,” Bell said.
The administration has faced several legal battles on this front. The Treasury Department reached an agreement with DHS last April to share Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data that was ultimately struck down in court.
However, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was allowed to share Medicaid data with ICE, after a judge ruled in December that the process could go forward with some limitations.
Other Democratic lawmakers have also raised concerns about the legality of the widespread use of these technologies.
“There’s a lot of questions as to what kind of legal process they follow anyway,” Rep. Nellie Pou (D-N.J.) told The Hill. “They’re already, in many ways, violating the law. They’re in many ways going beyond that of what the law authorizes them to do, so certainly, we need to rein them in. We need to make sure that we protect the privacy of our citizens.”
“If it means that we have to create a law to tell them that they have to follow the law, so be it,” added Pou, who has separately introduced a bill to limit ICE from swapping or removing vehicle license plates during their operations.
Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) suggested it would ultimately require Americans going to court to seek an end to these practices or for Democrats to retake control “for us to do anything, because Republicans refuse to.”
DHS has denied any improper use with any of the technologies they’ve recently acquired.
“All DHS software is lawful and in accordance with all applicable legal authorities,” a DHS spokesperson said in a statement, adding that they respond to lawmaker concerns “through official channels.”
Pen-Link and NEC, which makes Mobile Fortify, did not respond to requests for comment.
While Democratic lawmakers have introduced various pieces of legislation to limit DHS’s use of technology, those bills have failed to advance in the Republican-controlled Congress.
GOP members have so far been widely supportive of the president’s immigration agenda, allocating $170 billion for immigration enforcement as part of Trump’s tax and spending bill, which was enacted last July.
When asked about potential legal concerns, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) noted that those on U.S. soil are protected against unreasonable searches and seizures.
“There is a Fourth Amendment,” he said, noting that clashes with protestors were among the reasons he’s called for immigration enforcement to be done closer to the border .
“[These agents are] not trained for crowd control. These roaming patrols should be, I think, conducted closer to the border and not in our major city streets.”
Republicans and Democrats are currently at a stand still in broader negotiations over DHS funding in the wake of the killings of two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, by immigration officials in Minneapolis last month.
DHS funding lapsed earlier this month, after the two sides failed to reach an agreement to prevent a shutdown of the agency. In late January, lawmakers passed a major funding package that covered the remainder of the government, while approving a two-week stopgap measure for DHS that expired on Feb. 13.
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