U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is launching an initiative to expand its partnerships with industry with a focus on big data tools and mobile enforcement technology, as it looks to scale up immigration detention rates.
ICE’s new quarterly “industry days” will focus on a specific type of technology each session. The first, which will be held in mid-February, will focus on big data-related products, according to ICE Chief Information Officer Dustin Goetz, who announced the initiative Thursday morning at the Homeland Security and Defense Forum in Washington.
Goetz said ICE specifically wants data sources ICE can tap into or analytical capabilities that will refine the agency’s case management system. He added the agency also wants data products that can be used by immigration enforcement agents to get to “targets with high fidelity and confidence that when someone goes somewhere, [agents] know something’s going to be there.”
“When we talk about the future of ICE and how we’re going to do business, it’s all inevitably going to go back to how we’re standardizing data and how we’re consuming … the data that’s going to come through different technologies,” Goetz said about ICE’s technology priorities.
ICE is poised to launch new technology that will reduce the amount of time spent entering data on each detainee from 45 minutes on average to nearly 30 seconds, Goetz said.
“That’s 45 minutes that you’re sitting down, typing the data in from one application into the next application, and from every minute that … they’re not back out on the streets, there’s time lost and trying to apprehend the next person … So, it’s very important to us to try to figure out how we are going to reduce that processing time,” Goetz said.
To support field operations, Goetz said ICE is also placing an emphasis on mobility-enabling products and services.
He explained that the agency is shifting facilities away from traditional landline setups and toward Wi-Fi-first connectivity as it opens and upgrades more locations. Part of that includes pushing more mobile capabilities into the field, such as ICE’s controversial app Mobile Fortify.
First reported in September, the biometric mobile app allows agents to scan faces and pull up information on individuals captured by their camera. The app pulls data from government databases, according to Democratic senators who wrote to ICE in September demanding more information on the app’s use and development.
That request for more information – and another sent in November – have gone unanswered by ICE. A bill introduced last week by Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., is aimed at restricting ICE’s use of the app, which Thompson said is “an outrageous affront to the civil rights and civil liberties of U.S. citizens and immigrants alike.”
While details on how the app was developed and when it was first used are still unknown, Goetz said Thursday that ICE is stress-testing Mobile Fortify – and two other mobile apps dubbed EAGLE and Mobile Identify – to ensure the agency can reliably support field operations.
According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, facial recognition technology can be inaccurate for communities of color. Specifically, Asian and Black communities have between 10 and 100 times the rate of false positives compared to white communities when identified using facial recognition technology.
Indigenous Americans have the highest rate of false positives across tested demographics.
Outside of field operations, Goetz said ICE has created an internal AI with chat capabilities that has been named Stella, which he said is automating some of ICE’s lower-level business functions.