'Recipe for disaster': Alarm as unearthed ICE plan stokes fears of 'terrorizing' Americans

An internal government document obtained by 404 Media reveals that Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to arm more than 1,200 local police departments with a flawed facial recognition app capable of scanning anyone's face — no warrant, no consent, no notice required.The app, called the ICE Task Force Module, would run face photos against a database of more than 250 million DHS and State Department records to determine whether someone is subject to deportation. The document — a Privacy Threshold Analysis filed by ICE's own privacy unit — acknowledges that U.S. citizens will inevitably be swept up in the scans. Every photo taken, whether it matches a target or not, gets stored for 15 years.The technology would be distributed to agencies enrolled in the 287(g) program, which currently includes 1,220 departments across 32 states and two U.S. territories. Those local officers, the New York Civil Liberties Union has argued, are essentially turned into ICE agents.Civil liberties groups say the plan is a disaster waiting to happen — and point to a track record that backs them up. In April 2025, Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, a U.S. citizen with his Social Security card in hand, was arrested and held for 30 hours after ICE's facial recognition system wrongly flagged him as an unauthorized alien.Nate Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told 404 Media the plan is built on a broken foundation. 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, Wessler said. 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.Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy Technology's Security and Surveillance Project, warned when an earlier version of the app briefly surfaced on the Google Play Store that handing this powerful tech to police is like asking a 16-year old who just failed their drivers exams to pick a dozen classmates to hand car keys to.Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and senior public interest technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told 404 Media the new document confirms the worst. Face surveillance was already a dangerous infringement of civil liberties in the hands of ICE agents, Quintin said. Putting it in the hands of ICE's local partners will subject even more Americans to omnipresent surveillance and unjust detainment.