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US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) plans to begin collecting photographs of everyone leaving the US for Mexico or Canada by car. The photographs will then be matched to the images in the passengers’ passports, visas, or travel documents.
Jessica Turner, a CBP spokesperson, didn’t provide a timeline for when this will begin; she told Wired that the agency is “still working on how we would handle outbound vehicle lanes.”
Turner also didn’t explicitly say that the new face-scanning initiative is intended to track self-deportation by undocumented persons, something the Trump administration has encouraged, but she didn’t rule it out either. Photos will be used to verify later crossings into the US.
The news comes as Homeland Security officials are leaning on technology to control border crossings. Wired reported earlier this week that CBP is soliciting pitches from tech firms about how to implement a real-time facial-recognition tool that could automatically take photos of everyone in a vehicle, including those in the backseat, matching them to their official documents.
The CBP said it is currently using a comparable facial-recognition tool across US air, sea, and pedestrian entrances, but wants to bring this type of tech to “a land-vehicle environment.”
Meanwhile, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently signed a $29.9 million deal with data analytics giant Palantir to create a new system called ICE Immigration Lifecycle Operating System, or ImmigrationOS, to assist in "targeting and enforcement prioritization, " such as arresting migrants who overstay their visas or are members of criminal gangs.