Senators Demand DHS Abandon Plan to Equip ICE Agents With Biometric Smart Glasses
Democratic senators led by Markey and Merkley warn a $7.5M DHS smart glasses proposal would let ICE agents covertly identify people in public using facial recognition.
Overview
A group of Democratic senators, led by Edward Markey of Massachusetts and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, has formally demanded that the Department of Homeland Security abandon a proposal to develop biometric-equipped smart glasses for use by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection agents. The senators warn the technology would allow federal officers to covertly identify people in public spaces in real time — without their knowledge or consent — converting everyday environments into searchable biometric databases.
The demand comes as DHS has requested $7.5 million in its fiscal year 2027 budget to develop the devices, according to Biometric Update, with the proposal sitting inside a broader expansion of the agency’s mobile biometric enforcement capabilities.
What the DHS Proposal Says
The $7.5 million request appears in DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate’s fiscal year 2027 budget justification, under the Border Security and Immigration Mission Center. The budget describes a milestone to develop “an operational prototype of smart glasses that enables biometric identification of illegal aliens,” according to Biometric Update.
The glasses are designed to supplement Mobile Fortify, an existing facial recognition application developed by NEC and deployed for both CBP and ICE as of May 20, 2025. Mobile Fortify allows agents to capture facial images, collect contactless fingerprints, photograph identity documents, and send the data to CBP for matching against government databases. The smart glasses would migrate these capabilities from handheld phones to wearable devices — making the process, as critics note, “faster, less obvious, and more continuous” compared to phone-based identification.
DHS’s broader biometrics portfolio for FY 2027 includes $16 million for biometrics and identity management overall, Biometric Update reported.
The Senators’ Letter
In their letter to DHS, Markey and Merkley did not mince language. “DHS should immediately abandon any plans it has to develop this technology,” the senators wrote, according to Biometric Update.
The letter argues the glasses could enable officers to “capture thousands of images of faces each day” in public spaces without subjects’ awareness, and raises the prospect of systematic targeting. “An ICE officer could use smart glasses to identify and later target peaceful protesters, even exploiting that information to create a database of President Trump’s political opponents,” the senators wrote.
The letter also frames the issue in broader civil liberties terms: “Every person in the United States has the right to move through daily life without fear that the federal government is tracking, scanning, and cataloguing their every step.”
Senators gave DHS a deadline of June 4 to provide documentation covering constitutional and privacy assessments, civil rights evaluations, data collection and retention practices, third-party vendors involved in the program, and compliance with state biometric privacy laws.
A Growing Enforcement Architecture
The smart glasses proposal does not stand alone. It represents one piece of a larger mobile biometric enforcement infrastructure that DHS has been assembling since the beginning of the Trump administration’s second term.
The integration of the various tools has drawn additional congressional scrutiny. Representative Bennie Thompson introduced legislation describing Mobile Fortify as “an unproven biometric technology still in beta,” according to Biometric Update. Senator Ron Wyden, Representatives Dan Goldman and Nydia Velázquez separately demanded information about DHS and ICE use of Palantir analytics technologies, which ICE’s Matthew Elliston, assistant director of law enforcement systems, credited with increasing the agency’s target location success rate from “around 27 percent to just under 80 percent” and reducing investigative work from hours to “10 to 15 minutes.”
Representative Ro Khanna described the smart glasses concept as a “scary thought.” Representative Carlos Gimenez offered the opposing view: “There is no expectation of privacy when you’re in the street.”
The legislative backdrop expanded further in late April, when President Trump signed the Homeland Security and Further Additional Continuing Appropriations Act (Public Law 119-86) on April 30, 2026 — a law that also embedded new biometric collection authorities and mandatory autonomous surveillance requirements into DHS’s operating framework, according to Biometric Update. The law appropriated $222.9 million to CBP for procurement and improvements, $20 million for body-worn cameras for immigration enforcement agents, and authorizes “the collection and use of biometrics” at USCIS Application Support Centers under virtual oversight.
Legislative Pushback
Markey is not new to this fight. He previously introduced the ICE Out of Our Faces Act, legislation that would prohibit ICE and CBP from acquiring or using facial recognition and other biometric identification systems entirely, according to Biometric Update.
The current congressional battle over mobile biometric enforcement comes as a broader question remains unresolved: whether DHS will finish building out this enforcement architecture before Congress establishes regulatory limits on it, as Biometric Update framed the issue.
The Machine Herald has previously reported on ICE’s confirmed domestic use of Paragon Graphite spyware and on an ACLU-led coalition demanding Meta abandon facial recognition plans for consumer smart glasses — two parallel fronts in the same ongoing struggle over where biometric identification ends and mass surveillance begins.
What We Don’t Know
DHS has not publicly confirmed whether the smart glasses would use existing commercial hardware, custom-built optics, or a combination. The agency’s position — that no federal funds have been committed to smart glasses at this time — does not address the budget justification for the FY 2027 prototype milestone. No DHS response to the senators’ June 4 deadline has been published as of May 22, 2026.
The extent of private-sector vendor involvement, beyond NEC’s existing Mobile Fortify contract, remains undisclosed. It is also unclear whether any Privacy Impact Assessment has been conducted for the proposed smart glasses program under the Privacy Act or the E-Government Act.