Comment by Jenna Ruddock

Biometric surveillance poses an urgent threat to our fundamental rights. Facial recognition and other biometric surveillance technologies have been used by authoritarian regimes around the world to target journalists, protestors, and marginalized communities; they are increasingly central to infrastructures of mass surveillance and criminalization. We are watching these abuses evolve as DHS pours more money into expanding its own surveillance dragnet — including mobile facial recognition tools that ICE and Border Patrol agents are using to profile, track and target people in the street. The ICE Out of Our Faces Act interrupts this trajectory and is a critical step towards safeguarding our communities and our rights.