The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), alongside ICE, has received gain access to to millions of Americans’ photos all the way through their access to DMV files, including in Utah, Vermont, and Washington. These states offer a driver’s license or limited permit to undocumented immigrants.

 

Researchers from Georgetown Law gained thousands of email records and facial recognition requests placed by the agents to the DMVs over the last five years and supplied them to the Post. The lists show that the DMVs in Utah and Vermont complied to these requests, the New York Times reports, however it has not been clear if Washington state carried out the requests. In Utah, the Post reported, there were about 1,000 requests made between 2015 and 2017.

 

San Francisco and Somerville, Massachusetts, have suspended these agencies from accessing their citizens’ DMV records, attributing their reasoning to a breach of public trust.  

 

As the Post notes, police typically have access to information for example fingerprints but the DMV data permits access to photographs that they then match with suspects. The DMV’s complicity varied, according to reports: While some required court order, in some other cases, a mere email to the DMV including a “probe photo” would suffice. The DMV authorities would then search their data for a potential match and provide it to the officials.

 

“These states have never told undocumented people that when they apply for a driver’s license they are also turning over their face to ICE,” Harrison Rudolph, an associate at Georgetown, revealed the Times. “That is a huge bait and switch.”

 

Source: TRONSERVE