Although U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is not usually the first federal agency that comes to mind when discussing surveillance, it should not be overlooked.
For years, ICE has conducted surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations as part of its immigration enforcement efforts.
Now, with the passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill” last summer, ICE received a $75 million increase to invest in and expand its surveillance technology portfolio.
Enlace Latino NC spoke with surveillance experts to break down the technologies the federal agency is currently using and the greatest risks for immigrant communities.
Facial recognition technologies
One of the technologies at the top of ICE’s arsenal is facial recognition, with programs such as Mobile Fortify and Clearview AI among the most commonly used by federal agents in the field.
“There are reports that this application, Mobile Fortify, is being used by agents in the field to conduct facial recognition scans on individuals they encounter during immigration-related stops,” Andrew Crocker, surveillance litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told Enlace Latino NC.
Crocker explained that agents take a photo of a person’s face from a relatively close distance to compare it with their databases and identify the individual and their immigration status.
As for Clearview AI, a facial recognition software that compares photos with images scraped from the internet, Crocker said it is “an older tool that has been around for several years.”
“As reported, it uses commercially or publicly available photos rather than government databases; that is a major distinction, and we know there is a significant contract between Clearview and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS),” Crocker said.
Last September, one of DHS’s divisions, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), signed a $3.75 million contract with Clearview AI to support its investigations and identify “victims and offenders in cases of child sexual exploitation and assaults against law enforcement officers.”
According to Wired, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) also plans to allocate $225,000 to obtain one year of access to Clearview AI.
Legal concerns
According to Crocker, these technologies are known to produce inaccurate results, which can pose significant risks to immigrant communities.
Especially when images are low quality, blurry, obscured or taken from the side, a report conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2024 found that facial recognition tools can be less accurate.
“You can think about the risk of misidentification — I think those would be real grounds for concern, regardless of the technology used to initiate the process. But the fact that they are using a notoriously ineffective and inaccurate technology really heightens those concerns,” Crocker said.
Margaret Hu, a law professor at William & Mary Law School, told Enlace Latino NC that inaccurate facial recognition systems may implicate protections granted by the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.
“It is important to examine how this may affect a claim under the Fourth Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Hu explained.
“All individuals are at risk of facing serious legal consequences when biometric identification systems, such as artificial intelligence facial recognition systems, are inaccurate and may potentially misidentify us,” she added.
However, undocumented immigrants, individuals with limited legal protections, are the most vulnerable.
Automated license plate readers
Essentially, automated license plate readers (ALPR) are high-speed cameras that can be placed in fixed locations, such as traffic poles, police patrol vehicles or light posts, to capture images of people’s vehicles and their license plates.
These images are then stored in a database that is accessible not only to the law enforcement agency that installs the system, but also to agencies across the country.
“One of the largest providers is called Flock [Safety], and it serves hundreds of jurisdictions across the country and has thousands of cameras installed nationwide,” Crocker said.
“Depending on how the city that contracts with Flock has configured its cameras, those databases may be accessible to a large number of law enforcement agencies across the country,” he added.
ICE does not have a signed contract with Flock Safety; however, according to a report by 404 Media, the federal agency does not need one to access the database.
According to data obtained by 404 Media, local police agencies in several cities across the country conduct searches related to “immigration” in Flock’s ALPR system as part of ICE investigations.
Tracking and surveillance methods
According to Crocker, the purpose of ALPR systems is to track people’s movements.
“When law enforcement uses them, it’s not just a snapshot in time of where a vehicle has been, but the ability to track that vehicle, that license plate, across many different cameras, whether within a jurisdiction that has hundreds of cameras throughout the city, but also nationwide, since they are interconnected,” he said.
In North Carolina, 108 law enforcement agencies use ALPR systems, according to the “Atlas of Surveillance,” a database maintained by EFF.
Most contracts between law enforcement agencies and Flock in North Carolina state that data is stored for 30 days, which Crocker said is a long time to retain this type of data.
“Even a month of data will tell you a lot — people move around a lot,” Crocker said.
ICE is not the only agency using these technologies
Hu also noted that ICE is just one of the agencies within DHS, and not the only one using these tools.
“It is essential for the public to understand that some of these technologies are not used solely by ICE, but are employed across multiple units within DHS and also by state and local law enforcement agencies, as well as federal law enforcement agencies,” Hu explained.
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