What happened

In an immigration enforcement incident in Oregon, USA, in 2025, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) used smartphone facial recognition app Mobile Fortify to identify a detained woman and determine her immigration status. 

Instead of returning a correct identity, the tool produced two entirely different and incorrect names for the same person across scans. 

This error raises questions about the accuracy and reliability of a system that ICE has publicly described as providing “definitive” results about someone’s identity and status, sometimes even over official documents such as birth certificates.

Why it happened

The incident stems from a combination of technical limitations and a lack of procedural guardrails. 

Facial recognition is notoriously unreliable in the field (where lighting and angles vary) compared to controlled office settings; equally, research from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and other bodies consistently shows that facial recognition algorithms have higher error rates for women and people of colour.

At the same time, internal ICE communications revealed that the agency instructed officers to treat a biometric match as a “definitive determination” of status, indicating institutional over-reliance on the app.

Furthermore, the app was fast-tracked for nationwide deployment in early 2025 without a full Privacy Impact Assessment, and internal policies were reportedly weakened to allow matches to override physical evidence like birth certificates.