ICE’s Plan to Let Cops Around the Country Scan Faces to Verify Immigration Status

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ICE<br>ICE’s Plan to Let Cops Around the Country Scan Faces to Verify Immigration Status

Joseph Cox

Jun 5, 2026<br>at 12:51 PM

ICE plans to give potentially more than a thousand agencies access to a facial recognition app that verifies a person's immigration status.

Image: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, via Flickr, and 404 Media.

📄<br>This article was primarily reported using public records requests. We are making it available to all readers as a public service. FOIA reporting can be expensive, please consider subscribing to 404 Media to support this work. Or send us a one time donation via our tip jar here.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to give potentially more than a thousand local law enforcement agencies a facial recognition app that would query a database of hundreds of millions of images to verify someone’s immigration status, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media.<br>The app would be a dramatic escalation in the technology being used to carry out the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are already using Mobile Fortify, a facial recognition app that taps into a wide array of DHS and other government databases, on U.S. streets, stopping people and scanning their faces. With that app, ICE officers point their phone camera at a person, the app scans their face, and the app returns a wealth of biographical information and whether they have been issued an order of removal. The app has made mistakes and been used against American citizens.<br>With this second app, much of that capability would now be in the hands of local police who essentially have become extensions of ICE.<br>“This embarrassingly cursory document utterly fails to acknowledge the harms that will flow from putting a flawed face recognition app in the hands of many thousands of local police,” Nate Wessler, deputy director with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told 404 Media. “Sending local cops out to indiscriminately scan our faces, with a system that is known to generate false matches, that saves our data for 15 years, and that ensnares police into making immigration decisions that they are untrained for and that will undermine community safety efforts, is a recipe for disaster and for terrorizing members of communities across the country. DHS’s privacy regulators fell down on the job. Now it’s up to lawmakers to ensure this dangerous technology stays off our streets.”<br>💡<br>Do you know anything else about this app? Are you a current or former ICE or CBP employee? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

“These ICE non-federal officers will use the TFM [Task Force Module] app during an encounter to verify the target of an operation’s identity, and if warranted, investigate and determine the target’s immigration status (i.e., whether the individual is subject to removal) through facial recognition,” the document reads.<br>The name of the app is the “ICE Task Force Module App (TFM App),” according to the document. When an officer scans someone’s face, the app will run their face against a database of more than 250 million DHS and State Department records, and then provide instructions to the officer. Either “not detain or arrest under ICE jurisdiction,” or the app will provide a reference code the officer can use to get additional information from ICE.<br>A screenshot of the document. Image: 404 Media.404 Media previously reported the existence of Mobile Identify, which appears to be the same app under a different name, in November. It was removed a short while later from the Google Play Store and has not returned. The new document also mentions making the app available through the Apple App Store.<br>It is not clear when, or if, ICE or other DHS components will roll out the app to local police. DHS did not respond to a request for comment, and the document lists the launch date as September 24, 2025. But the new document describes in detail the plan behind giving this facial recognition app to local police.<br>“The collection of face images allows ICE non-federal law enforcement officers to verify identity and immigration status (whether the individual is removable),” the document adds. ICE acknowledges in the document that the app may be used on U.S. citizens. “It is conceivable that a photo taken by an ICE non-federal law enforcement officers using the TFM mobile application could be that of someone other than a removable individual, including U.S....