United States Customs and Border Protection plans to log every person leaving the country by vehicle by taking photos at border crossings of every passenger and matching their faces to their passports, visas, or travel documents, WIRED has learned.
The escalated documentation of travelers could be used to track how many people are self-deporting, or leave the US voluntarily, which the Trump administration is fervently encouraging to people in the country illegally.
CBP exclusively tells WIRED, in response to an inquiry to the agency, that it plans to mirror the current program it’s developing—photographing every person entering the US and match their faces with their travel documents—to the outbound lanes going to Canada and Mexico. The agency currently does not have a system that monitors people leaving the country by vehicle.
“Although we are still working on how we would handle outbound vehicle lanes, we will ultimately expand to this area,” CBP spokesperson Jessica Turner tells WIRED.
Turner could not provide a timeline on when CBP would begin monitoring people leaving the country by vehicle.
She tells WIRED that CBP currently matches photos of people coming into the country with “all documented photos, i.e., passports, visas, green cards, etc,” and adds that all “alien/non-US citizens encounter photos taken at border crossing” are stored by CBP. “The encounter photos can be used for subsequent crossings to verify identity,” Turner says. She did not specify whether CBP may integrate additional photos or data sources in the future.
When asked, Turner says it’s not currently evident that a purpose of the outbound face-matching system would be tracking self-deporations. “Not to say it won’t happen in the future, though, with the way self-deportation is going,” Turner says. She later adds that the goal of an outbound system would be to “biometrically confirm departure from the US.” This differs from the purpose of tracking people coming into the US, she says, which also considers the “purpose and intent” of entering the country.
WIRED reported this week that CBP recently asked tech companies to send pitches on how they would ensure every single person entering the country by vehicle, including people two or three rows back, would be instantly photographed and matched with their travel documents. CBP has struggled to do this on its own. The results of a 152-day test of this system, which took place at the Anzalduas border crossing between Mexico and Texas, showed that the cameras captured photos of everyone in the car that met “validation requirements” for face-matching just 61 percent of the time. Another test, conducted at the Mariposa border crossing between Arizona and Mexico last year, had a success rate of 80.7 percent.
Currently, neither CBP nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement have any publicly known tools for tracking self-deportations, aside from an CBP app that allows people to tell the agency when they leave the country.
Last month, ICE announced that it is paying the software company Palantir $30 million to build a tool called ImmigrationOS that would give the agency “near real-time visibility” on people self-deporting from the US, with the goal of having accurate numbers on how many people are doing so, according to a contract justification published a few days later.
