Mobile Fortify

As for verifying petitioner's immigration status before the arrest, Cooney backtracked on calling the Law Enforcement Support Center as he originally described.

Instead, he recounts having entered petitioner's name on a smartphone app called Mobile Fortify, which Cooney states connects instantly to multiple federal and state databases, including DHS's biometric systems and passport and visa records.

That query returned no records indicating petitioner had any prior encounters with CBP or ICE, which to Cooney indicated that the petitioner was present in the United States without legal entry." How-- Interesting conclusion.

So what does DHS Secretary Marquain Mullen have to say about this when pressed about the escalation of unlawful use of force by his agents? What does he have to say?

Whatever the policy memo says, immigrant communities, black and brown communities are especially carry the weight and legal status is a thin excuse for what functions as whatever the fuck is going on right now when they are hunting people.

In the Chawla case, Cooney typed his name and birthdate into Mobile Fortify, ICE's facial recognition app.

It showed no record of lawful entry, but it did show a federal work permit.

Cooney took the missing record as proof that Chawla was undocumented.

So what we really documented in the report was the wide use of facial recognition technology.

ICE has, um, a program that they use called Mobile Fortify where they are able to like scan someone's face and determine whether or not they should be detained.

And so we saw them using that technology in the field trying to detain people.

We similarly saw them taking photos and using facial recognition technology against protesters and legal observers and real sort of some scary incidents of surveillance.

So in many of the communities we, you know, saw the way that ICE was using Mobile Fortify in the field to detain people, but also massive use of things like drones, like helicopters to be able to broadly monitor communities.

We also documented a handful of incidents with, um, where they would do this practice that we were calling where they would follow people home.

And so this was something that was described to us by almost every single rapid responder that we spoke to across the four cities.

You know, Clearview AI, um, PimEyes.

Clearview was kind of cr- created a face-identifying app by scraping billions of photos from the internet.

You could match somebody's face to their social media profile or other inter- you know, other internet photos, and they were selling it to police.

PimEyes w- is an online website that anyone can access that will do the same thing.

You upload a photo of somebody, and it will try to find other photos of them on the public web.

They don't do social media sites.

But around kind of twenty nineteen, twenty twenty, some of these startups were starting to come online and sell their products, and they essentially were the canaries in the coal mine for, "How is this gonna go? What's gonna happen to these companies?" You know, "How is society gonna see them? How are they gonna get cracked down on by regulators?" Fast-forward to now, those companies are still around.

PimEyes is still there.