Newly Released Footage Highlights ICE’s Use of Facial Recognition Technology

The Guardian has published newly-released body camera footage showing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents using facial recognition technology to identify farm workers in Oregon after violently arresting them.

The videos were initially released in court in an ongoing class action lawsuit against ICE’s arrest practices – which include arresting people without a warrant, manufacturing paperwork and creating warrants after making arrests, using quotas, and targeting entire neighborhoods. These practices have become known as “arrest first, justify later.”

The footage, which is from an ICE arrest in October 2025, shows an ICE agent using his phone to take an image of the face of one of the detained farm workers.

This followed video footage of ICE officers stopping a van that was heading to a job site, shattering the van’s windows, and violently detaining the seven farm workers inside it. When one of the farm workers attempts to call 911 and ask for a lawyer, an ICE agent demands that she turn her phone off, and exits the video.

“She wants to lawyer up,” one ICE agent says to other agents. “She doesn’t want to identify herself, we’ll just take her.”

When the woman repeats that she wants to call the police, the ICE agent says, “What are the police going to do? We are the police.”

Agents then pull her out of the van, as the woman says, “This can’t happen to us. They’re using force.”

After detaining the workers and restraining them outside of a building, an ICE agent is seen holding a phone up to one worker’s face, appearing to scan his face. Later, one of the agents can be heard saying, “Mobile Fortify couldn’t find him,” referring to the facial recognition application used by ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

ICE did not have a warrant to detain the farm workers. In February, a judge ruled that the arrests were unlawful and unjustified, that ICE agents had engaged in “misconduct,” and that agents in Oregon could no longer arrest without warrants.

ICE agents also testified in court that they had chosen the location of the arrests in part from using another ICE mobile app called Elite, an app created by Palantir that helps ICE find neighborhoods to target.

Another ICE agent testified in court that she attempted to use facial recognition technology on the worker who had asked for a lawyer. The ICE agent said that she found a “very similar person” using facial recognition, a woman named Maria, and that she was unsure if she was the same person. But the woman detained was not, in fact, named Maria.

In another lawsuit in Illinois, the Mobile Fortify application was found to have been used over 100,000 times by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents over the past year, showing a marked expansion in the use of facial recognition technology. But this technology has been found to be inaccurate, and to have higher error rates when identifying women and people of color – who are most often targeted by ICE.

DHS launched Mobile Fortify in spring 2025. The app allows ICE agents to take a photo of a person’s face, before pulling from federal databases to determine identity, immigration status and immigration history.

DHS approved the use of the app by dismantling centralized privacy reviews and removing limits on facial recognition within the organization.

Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) speech, privacy and technology project, said, “Here we have ICE using this technology in exactly the confluence of conditions that lead to the highest false match rates.”

“ICE is effectively trying to create a biometric checkpoint society,” he added.

Jon McCroy Jones, a policy analyst at the ACLU, said, “Technology that is unreliable even in controlled settings should not be used to doll out consequences like detention and deportation. It isn’t difficult to imagine arrests due to some false match or database error.”

In Minneapolis and Chicago, this technology “wasn’t just used on immigrants” but also “on legal observers, peaceful protestors, and U.S. citizens,” he noted.

This has also been found to be the case in Maine, where ICE agents scanned the face of a woman who was acting as an observer and recorded her license plate. When she asked why they were taking her information, the ICE agent said, “‘Cause we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.” The observer has joined another class action lawsuit arguing that DHS and ICE are retaliating against lawful observers and taking actions designed to chill free speech.

The expansion of surveillance used by ICE and CBP was enabled by Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which transformed ICE into the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement agency.