ON WEDNESDAY, THE Department of Homeland Security published new details about Mobile Fortify, the face recognition app that federal immigration agents use to identify people in the field, undocumented immigrants and US citizens alike. The details, including the company behind the app, were published as part of DHS’s 2025 AI Use Case Inventory, which federal agencies are required to release periodically.
The inventory includes two entries for Mobile Fortify—one for Customs and Border Protection (CBP), another for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—and says the app is in the “deployment” stage for both. CBP says that Mobile Fortify became “operational” at the beginning of May last year, while ICE got access to it on May 20, 2025. That date is about a month before 404 Media first reported on the app’s existence.
The inventory also identified the app’s vendor as NEC, which had previously been unknown publicly. On its website, NEC advertises a face recognition solution called Reveal, which it says can do one-to-many searches or one-to-one matches against databases of any size. CBP says the app’s vendor is NEC, while ICE notes it was developed partially in house. A $23.9 million contract held between NEC and the DHS from 2020 to 2023 states that DHS was using NEC biometric matching products for “unlimited facial quantities, on unlimited hardware platforms, and at unlimited locations.” NEC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
