On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security published new details about Mobile Fortify, the facial recognition app that federal immigration agents use as a method to identify people in the field, undocumented immigrants and United States citizens alike. The details, including the company behind the app, were published as part of DHS’s 2025 AI Use Case Inventory, which federal agencies are required to release periodically.
The inventory includes two entries for Mobile Fortify—one for Customs and Border Protection, another for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—and says the app is in the “deployment” stage for both. CBP says that Mobile Fortify became “operational” at the beginning of May last year, while ICE got access to it on May 20, 2025. That date is about a month before 404 Media first reported on the app’s existence.
The inventory also identified the app’s vendor as NEC, which had previously been unknown publicly. On its website, NEC advertises a facial recognition solution called Reveal, which it says can do one-to-many searches or one-to-one matches against databases of any size. CBP says the app’s vendor is NEC while ICE notes it was developed partially in house. A $23.9 million contract held between NEC and the DHS from 2020 to 2023 states that DHS was using NEC biometric matching products for “unlimited facial quantities, on unlimited hardware platforms, and at unlimited locations.” NEC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Both CBP and ICE say that the app is supposed to help quickly confirm people’s identity, and ICE further says that it helps do so in the field “when officers and agents must work with limited information and access multiple disparate systems.”
ICE says that the app can capture faces, “contactless” fingerprints, and photographs of identity documents. The app sends that data to CBP “for submission to government biometric matching systems.” Those systems then use AI to match people’s faces and fingerprints with existing records, and return possible matches along with biographic information. ICE says that it also extracts text from identity documents for “additional checks.” ICE says it doesn’t own or interact directly with the AI models, and that those belong to CBP.
CBP says the “Vetting/Border Crossing Information/ Trusted Traveler Information” was used to either train, fine-tune, or evaluate the performance of Mobile Fortify, but it didn’t specify which, and didn’t respond to a request for clarification from WIRED.
CBP’s Trusted Traveler Programs include TSA Precheck and Global Entry. In a declaration earlier this month, a Minnesota woman said her Global Entry and TSA Precheck privileges had been revoked after interacting with a federal agent she was observing who told her they had “facial recognition.” In another declaration for a separate lawsuit, filed by the state of Minnesota, an individual who was stopped and detained by federal agents says an officer told them, “Whoever is the registered owner [of this vehicle] is going to have a fun time trying to travel after this.”
While CBP says there are “sufficient monitoring protocols” in place for the app, ICE says that the development of monitoring protocols is in progress, and that it will identify potential impacts during an AI impact assessment. According to guidance from the Office of Management and Budget, which was issued before the inventory says the app was deployed for either CBP or ICE, agencies are supposed to complete an AI impact assessment before deploying any high-impact use case. Both CBP and ICE say the app is “high-impact” and “deployed.”
DHS and ICE did not respond to requests for comment. CBP says it plans to look into WIRED’s inquiry.
The consequences of an incorrect match can be devastating. 404 Media reported that a woman was detained after being misidentified twice by the app. ICE says that the development of an appeals process is “in-progress,” along with “steps has the agency taken to consult and incorporate feedback from end users of this AI use case and the public.”
Source: www.wired.com
