Federal Mobile Biometric Identification (Mobile Fortify)

Mobile Fortify is used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection officers to identify people during encounters on the street. An officer photographs the person; the image is sent to CBP's Traveler Verification Service — the same infrastructure used for airport processing — and compared against government-held images. If no facial match returns, the app allows contactless fingerprint capture matched against IDENT, the largest biometric repository in the US government.

It reportedly also supports a "Super Query" searching databases covering individuals, vehicles, aircraft, vessels and addresses simultaneously. Its existence was first reported by 404 Media, via leaked internal emails, rather than disclosed.

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT

Three features distinguish it from the handheld facial recognition covered elsewhere on this site.

The gallery is border and travel biometric infrastructure rather than a policing watchlist. It therefore includes people who have never been arrested, and in many cases people whose only interaction with the state was entering the country lawfully.

It is multimodal. Where a facial match fails, fingerprints follow, which makes refusal considerably harder than with a face-only system.

And it operates federally. More than twenty US cities and states have banned or restricted local police use of facial recognition; a federal officer using this app in one of those jurisdictions is not covered by those bans. The ACLU has made this its central argument, and it is the most consequential structural point.

RETENTION AND CONSENT

A Privacy Threshold Analysis states that ICE does not provide individuals the opportunity to decline or consent to biometric collection, that photographs and fingerprints are retained for fifteen years including images that do not match existing DHS data, and that the app may be used regardless of a person's citizenship or immigration status.

That last point deserves emphasis: it is not restricted to non-citizens.

SCALE AND OVERSIGHT

A lawsuit brought by Illinois and Chicago in January 2026 states DHS had used the app in the field more than 100,000 times since launch. A Privacy Threshold Analysis indicates a related module launched in September 2025 and could be extended to more than a thousand state and local agencies operating under 287(g) agreements.

It was deployed without a completed Privacy Impact Assessment — the specific procedural failure driving the oversight response. A DHS Office of Inspector General audit is examining immigration enforcement data practices, prompted by senators in January 2026. On 5 February 2026 legislators introduced the "ICE Out of My Face Act", which would ban ICE and CBP use of facial recognition and other biometrics and require deletion. A coalition including EFF, EPIC and the Project on Government Oversight has demanded the app be shut down.

THE CASE FOR IT

Establishing identity during an encounter is a legitimate function, and officers frequently encounter people carrying no documents. Resolving that in seconds is faster than the alternative, which is often detention for the purpose of identification.

Contactless fingerprint capture is also more reliable than facial matching in poor conditions, and a system that verifies rather than guesses reduces one category of error.

THE CASE AGAINST

The absence of a completed Privacy Impact Assessment before deployment is not a technicality. It is the mechanism by which the US federal government is supposed to evaluate exactly these questions before a system is used on people, and it was skipped.

Fifteen-year retention of biometrics from people who did not match anything is difficult to justify on any operational rationale, and no consent mechanism exists.

The federal bypass of local bans is the deepest issue. Where a city has democratically decided its police will not use facial recognition, a federal officer conducting the same check on the same street defeats that decision entirely, and no local process can address it.

And a tool designed for immigration enforcement that may be used regardless of citizenship status means US citizens are subject to biometric identification with no ability to decline.

WHAT IS NOT ESTABLISHED

Whether a Privacy Impact Assessment has since been completed is not established.

How many of the 100,000-plus uses resulted in a correct identification, a wrongful one, or no match is not published.

Whether the app has been extended to 287(g) partner agencies in practice is not confirmed.

The outcome of the DHS OIG audit was not available at the time of writing.