Congressional and civil-liberties backlash over ICE/CBP facial recognition and broader domestic surveillance authorities
US lawmakers and civil-liberties advocates are escalating scrutiny of ICE and CBP use of facial recognition amid reports that immigration agents have used face-scanning tools on people observing or protesting enforcement activity. Proposed legislation dubbed the “ICE Out of Our Faces Act” would seek to bar ICE/CBP facial recognition use, alongside related demands to limit tracking of First Amendment activity and questions about whether ICE maintains a “domestic terrorists” database tied to immigration protests. Separately, records reviewed by WIRED indicate DHS’s Mobile Fortify facial-recognition app—rolled out in 2025 to “determine or verify” identities during operations—cannot reliably verify identity and is intended at best to generate investigative leads; the reporting also describes DHS approving the tool after weakening centralized privacy reviews and removing department-wide limits on facial recognition.
In parallel, Congress is debating the renewal of FISA Section 702, with lawmakers raising concerns that domestic surveillance authorities could be applied more broadly, including in support of immigration-related enforcement framed as a national security issue. Nextgov reports that transparency data shows intelligence agencies increased 702 searches in 2024 using identifiers linked to known or suspected Americans while pursuing foreign cyber and terrorism threats, even as the FBI reduced its own direct U.S.-person queries after new safeguards. A separate Nextgov item on an AI moratorium and sector-specific AI regulation is policy-focused and not directly tied to the ICE/CBP facial recognition deployments or Section 702 reauthorization debate described in the other reporting.
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