US Customs and Border Protection Program, photographing everyone leaving the United States by car
Wired learned that the American Customs and Border Protection Program logs into everyone who leaves the country through a vehicle by taking pictures at each passenger’s crossing point and matching their faces with a passport, visa or travel document.
Upgraded travelers’ documents can be used to track how many people self-replace, or voluntarily leave the U.S., and the Trump administration strongly encourages illegal people in the country.
The CBP specifically told Wired that in response to the institution's investigation, it plans to reflect its current plan in development (the person who comes into the United States to the travel document) for the outbound lanes to Canada and Mexico. The institution currently has no system to monitor people leaving the country by car.
“Although we are still working on the out-of-station lane, we will eventually expand into the area,” CBP spokesman Jessica Turner told Wired.
Turner was unable to provide a timeline on when the CBP began monitoring people leaving the country by car. She told Wired that the CBP currently matches the photos of people entering the country with “all recorded photos”, i.e. passports, visas, green cards, etc. “But it is impossible to confirm or deny whether CBP can integrate other photos or data sources in the future.
When asked, Turner said it is not clear that the purpose of the face-to-face matching system is to track self-substitution. “But it doesn't mean that the way it will develop will not be developed in the future with self-extending,” Turner said.
Wired reported this week that CBP recently asked tech companies to send them about how to ensure everyone enters the country by car, including two to three lines, will be shot immediately and matched with their travel documents. CBP has been working hard to do this. The results of the 152-day test conducted by the system took place at the Anzalduas border intersection between Mexico and Texas, indicating that these cameras captured photos of everyone in the car that met the “verification requirements” and encountered only 61% of the time.
Currently, neither CBP, immigration nor customs enforcement has any open self-substitution tools to track, except for the ICE app that allows people to tell agencies when leaving the country.
Last month, ICE announced it would pay software companies $30 million to build a tool called Immigration Agency that would give the agency a “near-real-time visibility” of self-substitutes from the United States, with the aim of publishing a contract a few days later with the aim of accurately counting how many people there were.
The CBP has not confirmed or denied whether its monitoring of outbound vehicles can be integrated with the immigration cluster.
ICE has not specified a location where Palantir gets data to power immigrants. However, the agency noted that Palantir could create immigration by configuring the case management system the company has provided for ICE since 2014.
