ICE DRIVER LICENSE FACIAL RECOGNITION DRIVERS

New York became the most recent state to enact a law allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain drivers licenses. Several of the state’s most populous jurisdictions - including the city of Baltimore, Montgomery County, and Prince George’s County - have limited their cooperation with ICE.Īccording to a Pew Research Center study done last year, more than 4 per cent of Maryland residents - or 275,000 people - are undocumented. The thousands of facial-recognition requests, internal documents and emails over the past five years indicate that investigators are using state DMV records to create 'the bedrock of an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure', The Washington Post reported.īut in those cases, ICE agents had to ask a state official to run the search. Last year, researchers at Georgetown Law learned that ICE was also employing face recognition technology to mine state driver’s license databases in Utah, Vermont, and Washington State. … ICE is using biometric information in the shadows, without government notice or public approval, to hunt down the most vulnerable people.’ ‘It’s a betrayal of immigrants’ trust for the to turn around and let ICE run warrantless searches on their faces,’ said Harrison Rudolph of Georgetown University Law School’s Center on Privacy and Technology.

Its law allowed driver's license applicants who did not have Social Security numbers to provide alternate proof of residence like home utility bills or tax identification numbers. Washington State was the first to do so in 1993.

The face recognition searches are 'routinely' used to enforce immigration law while other agencies use it to solve cybercrimes like possession of child pornography, according to ICE.Īccording to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 15 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws allowing unauthorized immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses. The spokesperson said ICE's investigative activities are in compliance with federal law. The above image shows an ICE agent detain a suspect in October 2015 Without a license, it's unlikely they'll get insurance and the financial protection it grants to the person behind the wheel and everyone else sharing the road with them.Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses facial recognition technology to scan driver's license photos from the Maryland DMV database, according to The Washington Post. This will likely deter some people who want to safely drive on the road and who have current knowledge of driving regulations. Maryland allows ICE officials across the country access to the state's system without any oversight or court approval. While other states, including Utah, Vermont, and Washington, also use their driver's license-databases to match a person's identity, those searches are done by state officials, putting a firewall between the data and enforcement officials.

Photo-recognition systems are capable of making mistakes, and those errors could lead to the wrong individual spending time in jail while trying to prove they're a citizen or documented immigrant. ICE has been known to arrest the wrong person during sweeps. Legal citizens and documented immigrants shouldn't rest easy. This type of unfettered access to such a large database of information has led to previous accounts of enforcement agents using access to spy on or stalk people. Allowing ICE access to private information on the residents of Maryland without, apparently, any oversight or warrant, sets a precedent that driver information is an open book to anyone in enforcement who wants it.

Ice driver license facial recognition