Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to rapidly expand the use of biometric technology throughout the country. country through the acquisition of 1,570 new iris scanners, as part of a federal contract awarded without public bid.

The measure, revealed in official documents published in SAM.gov and taken up by the specialized media Project Salt Box, will allow immigration agents to ify people in real-time using only the camera of a smartphone or mobile devices connected to a private biometric database.

According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Statement of Objectives, the system will be operated using technology developed by the Bi2 Technologies company, specialized in iris recognition and biometric tools used by police agencies in the United States.

The contract provides for the national deployment of the devices within 30 days after the award and will grant limited access Itated to the IRIS and MORIS platforms, systems capable of verifying identities and consulting arrest backgrounds in a matter of seconds.

According to federal documentation, the database contains more than five million arrest records associated with approximately ly 1.5 million unique persons, collected through agreements between Bi2 and more than 247 local police agencies across the country.

“The system can return histories of arrests and incarcerations in less than a second from virtually anywhere,” notes the technical description of MORIS cited in the report.

Iris recognition works by analyzing the unique pattern surrounding the pupil of the human eye. Bi2 ensures that its system identifies more than 265 different anatomical features and can operate even if the person wears glasses or glasses.

Although the company maintains that it is a tool designed to authenticate identities and not for mass surveillance, civil organizations and exp Privacy experts have expressed concern over the speed with which these types of technologies are being integrated into immigration and police operations.

One of the points that draws attention is that ICE decided to avoid a competitive bidding process. The agency justified the decision they argue that Bi2 maintains “the only national web-based biometric network” and that no other provider has access to a comparable database.

The expansion occurs in a context of hardening immigration policies promoted by Donald Trump, whose administration declared a border emergency and strengthened technological capabilities for surveillance, identification,and deportation.

The document also reveals that DHS had already awarded Bi2 a previous contract for $4.6 million in September 2025 to deploy 200 biometric devices. The new acquisition represents a much larger expansion of that infrastructure.

Another relevant aspect is that the system does not yet have FedRAMP certification, the federal standard used to verify the security of cloud platforms that handle sensitive information of the US government.

Despite this, ICE would have immediate access at the national level to the biometric system while the company develops barely a compliance draft to obtain authorization.

The contract establishes some restrictions on the handling of data. For example, Bi2 may not use the information obtained by ICE for commercial purposes nor share it with third parties. You must also delete images used in biometric queries after processing them and retain audit logs for at least 180 days.

However, the document does not mention independent audits, congressional oversight, or external control mechanisms over the use of the platform.

The implementation of the new scanners reinforces the growing dependence of federal agencies on biometric systems, facial recognition and digital monitoring tools for security and immigration control tasks.