Here’s the Company That Sold DHS ICE’s Notorious Face Recognition App
Wednesday, the The Department of Homeland Security has released new details about Mobile Fortify, the facial recognition app that federal immigration agents use to identify people in the field, undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens. The details, including the company behind the app, were released as part of DHS’s 2025 AI Use Case Inventory, which federal agencies are required to publish periodically.
The inventory includes two entries for Mobile Fortify – one for Customs and Border Protection (CBP), another for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – and indicates that the app is in the “rollout” phase for both. CBP says Mobile Fortify became “operational” in early May of last year, while ICE gained access on May 20, 2025. That date is about a month before 404 Media first reported the app’s existence.
The inventory also identified the app provider as NEC, which was previously unknown to the public. On its website, NEC advertises a facial recognition solution called Reveal, which it says can perform one-to-many searches or one-to-one matches with databases of any size. CBP says the app’s vendor is NEC, while ICE notes that it was partially developed in-house. A $23.9 million contract between NEC and DHS from 2020 to 2023 stipulates that DHS used NEC biometric matching products for “unlimited quantities of faces, on unlimited hardware platforms, and in unlimited locations.” NEC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
CBP and ICE say the app is meant to help quickly confirm people’s identities, and ICE further says it helps do that in the field “when officers and agents must work with limited information and access multiple disparate systems.”
ICE claims the app can capture faces, “contactless” fingerprints and photographs of identity documents. The app sends this data to CBP “for submission to government biometric matching systems.” These systems then use AI to match people’s faces and fingerprints with existing records, and return possible matches along with biographical information. ICE says it also extracts text from identity documents for “additional checks.” ICE says it does not own or directly interact with the AI models, and that they belong to CBP.
CBP says the “Vetting/Border Crossing Information/Trusted Traveler Information” was used to train, refine or evaluate the performance of Mobile Fortify, but it did not specify which ones and did not respond to a request for clarification from WIRED.
CBP’s Trusted Traveler programs include TSA PreCheck and Global Entry. In a statement earlier this month, a Minnesota woman said her Global Entry and TSA PreCheck privileges were revoked after she interacted with a federal agent she was shadowing who told her they had “facial recognition.” In another declaration for a separate lawsuit, filed by the state of Minnesota, an individual who was arrested and detained by federal agents claims that an officer told them: “Regardless of the registered owner [of this vehicle] I’m going to have a fun time trying to travel after this.
While CBP says there are “sufficient monitoring protocols” for enforcement, ICE says development of monitoring protocols is ongoing and will identify potential impacts during an AI impact assessment. According to Office of Management and Budget guidance, issued before the inventory indicates the application has been deployed for CBP or ICE, agencies are supposed to conduct an AI impact assessment. Before deploy any high-impact use cases. CBP and ICE say the app is “high impact” and “widespread.”
DHS and ICE did not respond to requests for comment. CBP says it plans to review WIRED’s investigation.
