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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
Okay, 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