Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is exploring developing a pair of smart glasses that would “supplement” the agency’s facial recognition Mobile Fortify application, which lets officers scan someone’s face to verify their citizenship, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official. Another person who attended a conference where a senior ICE official spoke about the plans also described them to 404 Media.
The smart glasses, if they came to fruition, would be yet another technological escalation in the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. 404 Media previously revealed ICE and Customs Border Protection (CBP) were using the internal app Mobile Fortify to scan peoples’ faces, and instantaneously query a wide range of government databases to decide whether to detain the person or not.
💡
Do you know anything else about tools or data ICE is using? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
Matthew Elliston, assistant director of Law Enforcement Systems & Analysis at ICE, said in a meeting the plan to create smartglasses was to “supplement Mobile Fortify,” the DHS official said. 404 Media granted the official anonymity as they weren’t permitted to speak to the press.
Separately, during the 2026 Border Security Expo which took place this week, Elliston was speaking. A participant asked Elliston what technologies the agency was looking for, according to Kenny Morris from the American Friends Service Committee who attended the conference. Elliston’s answer included “wearable heads up displays,” Morris said.
Elliston then said that assaults against ICE officials were up 1400 percent (similar figures have been disputed in press reports), and that smartglasses would let officers be hands-free to respond to any threats, Morris said.
404 Media first heard about ICE’s plan to use smart glasses to supplement Mobile Fortify several months ago from the DHS official. At the time, no written documentation of the plan was available. Last month, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein published a budget document which mentioned DHS’s plan to “deliver innovative hardware, such as operational prototypes of smart glasses, to equip agents with real-time access to information and biometric identification capabilities in the field.”
404 Media first revealed the existence of Mobile Fortify using leaked ICE emails. It is installed on DHS officials’ work phones, and performs facial recognition on somebody after an ICE official points their phone camera at a person. User manuals for the tool showed the app instantaneously runs a subject’s face against a bank of 200 million images, then pulls up their name, nationality, date of birth, unique identifiers such as their “alien” number, and whether an immigration judge has determined they should be removed from the country.
404 Media has documented ICE and CBP officials using the smartphone app on American streets, found ICE believes people cannot refuse to be scanned by the app, and that the app misidentified one woman, twice.
A DHS spokesperson told 404 Media in an email “At this time, no funds have been committed to any form of ‘smart glasses.’”
“The Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) is constantly assessing the needs of ICE and other DHS components to assist law enforcement officers in the field. These discussions involve privacy offices, chief information officers, and attorneys to ensure that any technology that DHS utilizes is within the full scope of the law,” the spokesperson added.
As we’ve reported, CBP officials have been seen multiple times wearing Meta’s Ray-Ban smartglasses during immigration operations. This is despite a ban on personal recording devices. A CBP spokesperson told 404 Media in an email “Recordings may only be done on government sanctioned devices. Officers and agents may wear personally purchased sunglasses.”
Dave Maass, senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told 404 Media that “DHS has been funding research into face-mounted surveillance goggles for quite some time, including Hololens systems designed to help CBP to supposedly ‘see terrorists.’ As the technology advances, it's not surprising that so has DHS's ambitions.”
“But at worst, we're talking about a technology that invades your privacy if an ICE or CBP officer even looks at you, but even at best, we're looking at a project that, like lots of DHS tech, just wastes taxpayer money on shiny gadgets,” he added.
