US allegedly thinking to use tech to recognize migrant kids as they age

To hell with privacy – especially if you’re a migrant. And if you’re underage. That seems to be the policy at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which is allegedly thinking of using facial recognition tech at the border.

According to the MIT Technology Review, DHS might employ this type of technology to track the identities of migrant children as they age – “down to the infant,” said John Boyd, assistant director of the department’s Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM).

The outlet quotes Boyd explaining at a conference back in June: “If we pick up someone from Panama at the southern border at age four, say, and then pick them up at age six, are we going to recognize them?”

Border security has, of course, been a forever hot topic in US politics. However, applying facial recognition technology to children seems both impractical and, first and foremost, invasive. When it comes to minors especially, privacy and consent should matter.

As for practicality, there aren’t enough training data sets of real children’s faces. The ones used usually consist of either low-quality images drawn from the web or small sample sizes with little diversity – the latter is an old problem in the world of facial recognition.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology noted in a 2019 report that commercial facial recognition systems are biased and falsely identify Black and Asian faces 10 to 100 times more often than they do white ones, Meredith Broussard noted in her 2023 book “More Than a Glitch.”

Still, the DHS seems eager to try this out. The department only officially denied it had plans to collect facial images from minors under 14 after MIT Technology Review published the story. The DHS also told Cybernews: "DHS does not collect facial images from minors under 14, and has no current plans to do so for either operational or research purposes."

According to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), 339,234 children arrived at the US border with Mexico in 2022, the last year for which numbers are currently available. Of those children, 150,000 were unaccompanied – the highest annual number on record.

If the face prints of even 1% of those children were in OBIM’s craniofacial structural progression initiative, the resulting data set would dwarf nearly all existing data sets of real children’s faces used for aging research, says MIT Technology Review.

According to a 2022 audit by the US Government Accountability Office, 18 of 24 federal law enforcement agencies use facial recognition technology.

The DHS explicitly began collecting face prints, iris scans, and DNA from non-US citizens entering the country after 9/11, even though, at times, fingerprints and photographs are enough.