ICE has run facial-recognition searches on millions of Maryland drivers – By Drew Harwell, Erin Cox (Washington Post) / Feb 26 2020
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have been permitted to run facial-recognition searches on millions of Maryland driver’s license photos without first seeking state or court approval, state officials said — access that goes far beyond what other states allow and that alarms immigration activists in a state that grants special driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants.
© David J. Phillip/AP An officer watches as undocumented immigrants are deported to El Salvador by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Houston in 2018. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip, File)
More than 275,000 such licenses have been issued statewide since 2013, when the state became the first on the East Coast to defy federal guidelines and allow undocumented immigrants to obtain a license without having to provide proof of legal status. The technology now under scrutiny could let an ICE official run a photograph of an unknown person through the system and see if any potentially undocumented immigrants are returned as a match.
“It’s a betrayal of immigrants’ trust for the [state] to turn around and let ICE run warrantless searches on their faces,” said Harrison Rudolph, a senior associate at Georgetown University Law School’s Center on Privacy & Technology. “It’s a bait-and-switch. … ICE is using biometric information in the shadows, without government notice or public approval, to hunt down the most vulnerable people.”
A top Maryland law enforcement official told state lawmakers in November that ICE officials had logged nearly 100 sessions in the state’s driver’s license database since 2018, according to a previously unpublicized letter obtained by The Washington Post. Each session could have included multiple searches of the Maryland Image Repository System database, which includes the photos, names, addresses and other personal information of roughly 7 million drivers statewide.
The battle to grant driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants spanned more than a decade in Maryland, and is viewed by immigrant-rights advocates as a capstone victory. In 2013, Maryland lawmakers voted to create the licenses despite federal laws requiring proof of immigration status on state-issued identification cards, following arguments from advocates that the change would boost road safety by requiring driver-safety tests and insurance coverage.
But immigrant-rights groups now believe ICE has used that legal protection to target undocumented immigrants who consented to offering their information and sat for a photograph.
“Having a license was something that was won and past, but now it’s opened up this vulnerability,” said Lydia Walther-Rodriguez, the Baltimore area director for CASA, an immigration-rights group. “After the victory occurred, there was a lot of trust that was given to the state. Now it’s the state’s responsibility to ensure that trust is not lost.”
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