The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has used funding from President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act to invest in a range of technologies that can be used to track both migrants and U.S. citizens.
DHS has purchased iris scanners, facial recognition software, web and social media scraping tools and even various cell phone tracking technologies among its new tools.
Democratic lawmakers concerned about the surge of new technologies have responded with several bills seeking to rein in the power of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as critics question whether the agency is trampling civil liberties with cutting-edge equipment.
"I think the chief concern is that ICE and DHS are pushing the boundaries of the law and the technologies that they're using," Don Bell, policy counsel at The Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight, told The Hill.
"ICE is pushing extremely aggressively to meet the campaign promise of delivering a mass deportation program," he added. "And so the overarching concern with that is surveillance doesn't always remain limited to the groups that are being targeted, which is bad in itself. Oftentimes, it ends up being expanded to target other groups."
ICE officers have used several facial recognition technologies, including the Mobile Fortify app, which can capture facial images, contactless fingerprints and photos of identity documents that are compared to existing records to identify individuals, including to determine whether or not they are citizens.
DHS has also purchased an iris-scanning app that can perform a reading from 10 to 15 inches away.
Also alarming critics are various methods for tracking or even unlocking cell phones.
Seperately, ICE has purchased WebLoc and Tangles, two tools from the company Pen-Link used to monitor geolocation data and scrape information from the web and social media.
"Both agencies have built an arsenal of surveillance technologies designed to track and to monitor and to target individual people, both citizens and non citizens alike," Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said at a press conference earlier this month.
"Facial recognition technology sits at the center of a digital dragnet that has been created in our nation over the past year."
"This frictionless mass surveillance is the stuff of nightmares, and it raises serious questions about how the Trump administration developed and tested this technology, how often officers are using it, and what happens to the data once it is collected," he added.
Check out the full report at TheHill.com.
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