At the end of 2023, after being laid off from my role at a healthcare analytics company, I began researching CBP One: a Customs and Border Protection app originally designed as a single access point for CBP services. I first looked into it as a UI/UX case study, focusing on how its facial recognition requirements shaped the experience of migrants using the app to seek legal entry at the southern border.
What I found and documented was a sprawling digital paper trail tracing the app’s evolution from its October 2020 launch to its cancellation on January 20, 2025. At the time of its demise, CBP One served as effectively the only route for undocumented immigrants to legally cross the U.S. southern border.
After Donald Trump canceled the app on Inauguration Day of his second term as president, it was resurrected as CBP Home—built on much of the same technology, but now aimed at tracking the “self-deportation” of immigrants as an alternative to forced removal by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The user base for both apps is staggering:
- Six days before Trump’s second inauguration, CBP issued a press release announcing that “more than 936,500 individuals have successfully scheduled appointments [via the CBP One app] to present at ports of entry instead of risking their lives in the hands of smugglers.” (DHS Secretary Kristi Noem would later state that CBP One “allowed more than one million aliens to illegally enter the country.”)
- A year later, the DHS Office of Public Affairs issued a press releasestating that there have already been “nearly 100,000 users of the CBP Home app.”
CBP One’s AI facial recognition has drawn criticism since it was first deployed to verify undocumented immigrants’ identities in early 2021. Today, that same class of technology fuels the federal deportation effort’s surveillance capabilities. These tools can be used to target anyone in America, immigrant or no, and are currently in use doing just that.
This page curates my ongoing research into how DHS uses AI to gather “personally identifiable information that belongs to individuals who are not suspected of any wrongdoing,” as U.S. lawmakers recently put it.
The posts gathered here document why they’re asking questions — and what the available evidence already tells us.
- This Is Not a Big Deal. Relax.
ICE’s Mobile Fortify app turns facial recognition into a street-level surveillance tool aimed at non-citizens and citizens alike. In October of 2020, during the latter part of the first Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security— specifically, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released a smartphone app with AI facial recognition capability. CBP claims that close to a … Read more - ICE’s domestic terrorism problem
In all of the horrific stories surrounding the killing of Renee Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross, I haven’t seen much speculation about why he was not only filming her with his smartphone at the time, but did so while moving around the front of her car, and even using it to record himself in … Read more - The wealthiest man in the world is an illegal immigrant
A few days ago, J.D. Vance accused Ilhan Omar of “immigration fraud.” She responded in a statement that began: “This is rich coming from someone who literally said they were willing to ‘create stories’ to redirect the media,” referring to Vance’s own admission to spreading the lie that Haitian immigrants eat people’s pets in September of 2024, … Read more - The immigrant physicians sustaining U.S. healthcare
The intersection of healthcare and immigration policy is found in the halls of hospitals and clinics across America, where increasing numbers of International Medical Graduates (IMGs) are filling in for doctors who won’t return, and state governments are doing their best to usher IMGs into practice where they’re sorely needed. Help (Badly) Wanted: Foreign Doctors … Read more - No border wands, just brutality: what the death of the CBP One app portends
It’s infuriating that I have to defend this profoundly unjust yet unfairly maligned, rights-violating, prison gate-keeping, Hollerith-ass, bureaucratic government-enforced insult to human dignity in app form, but here we are. On Inauguration Day, January 20th, one of the first things Trump did was cancel the CBP One app— an app developed by Customs and Border … Read more - J.D. Vance’s weird, dumb, little racist jab at CBP One
Note: All quotes from the debate in this post are pulled from CBS News’s transcript, for which I am incredibly grateful. In the vice presidential debate on Tuesday, J.D. Vance brought up the CBP One app out of nowhere, which has inspired a wave of misinformation spread by people who’d never heard of the app … Read more - AI Facial Recognition Technology in CBP One™
My review of the mobile app, CBP One™: The Border in Your Pocket, considered factors in the development of CBP One’s facial recognition engine, the Traveler Verification Service (TVS), that render it unsuitable for CBP One’s current usage in collecting information from migrants at the border. This post takes a closer look at how CBP … Read more - CBP One™: The Border in Your Pocket
In August of 2018, in light of the growing number of apps under Customs and Border Protection, the agency’s Office of Field Operations (OFO) announced that it would develop the CBP One mobile application in collaboration with the Office of Information Technology (OIT). The app would prevent the confusion that comes with travelers needing to … Read more - America: lousiest host everOkay, here’s the deal. How it should be. If you’re in the United States for reasons beyond your control– that is, you didn’t decide to come here on your own, pay for it on your own, and physically get yourself here on your own– you’re entitled to the rights and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship. Additionally, … Read more