The face-recognition app Mobile Fortify, now used by United States immigration agents in towns and cities across the US, is not designed to reliably identify people in the streets and was deployed without the scrutiny that has historically governed the rollout of technologies that impact people’s privacy, according to records reviewed by WIRED.

The Department of Homeland Security launched Mobile Fortify in the spring of 2025 to “determine or verify” the identities of individuals stopped or detained by DHS officers during federal operations, records show. DHS explicitly linked the rollout to an executive order, signed by President Donald Trump on his first day in office, which called for a “total and efficient” crackdown on undocumented immigrants through the use of expedited removals, expanded detention, and funding pressure on states, among other tactics.

Despite DHS repeatedly framing Mobile Fortify as a tool for identifying people through facial recognition, however, the app does not actually “verify” the identities of people stopped by federal immigration agents—a well-known limitation of the technology and a function of how Mobile Fortify is designed and used.

“Every manufacturer of this technology, every police department with a policy makes very clear that face recognition technology is not capable of providing a positive identification, that it makes mistakes, and that it’s only for generating leads,” says Nathan Wessler, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

Records reviewed by WIRED also show that DHS’s hasty approval of Fortify last May was enabled by dismantling centralized privacy reviews and quietly removing department-wide limits on facial recognition—changes overseen by a former Heritage Foundation lawyer and Project 2025 contributor, who now serves in a senior DHS privacy role.

DHS—which has declined to detail the methods and tools that agents are using, despite repeated calls from oversight officials and nonprofit privacy watchdogs—has used Mobile Fortify to scan the faces not only of “targeted individuals,” but also people later confirmed to be US citizens and others who were observing or protesting enforcement activity.

Reporting has documented federal agents telling citizens they were being recorded with facial recognition and that their faces would be added to a database without consent. Other accounts describe agents treating accent, perceived ethnicity, or skin color as a basis to escalate encounters—then using face scanning as the next step once a stop is underway. Together, the cases illustrate a broader shift in DHS enforcement toward low-level street encounters followed by biometric capture like face scans, with limited transparency around the tool’s operation and use.

Fortify’s technology mobilizes facial capture hundreds of miles from the US border, allowing DHS to generate nonconsensual face prints of people who, “it is conceivable,” DHS’s Privacy Office says, are “US citizens or lawful permanent residents.” As with the circumstances surrounding its deployment to agents with Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Fortify’s functionality is visible mainly today through court filings and sworn agent testimony.

In a federal lawsuit this month, attorneys for the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago said the app had been used “in the field over 100,000 times” since launch.

In Oregon testimony last year, an agent said two photos of a woman in custody taken with his face-recognition app produced different identities. The woman was handcuffed and looking downward, the agent said, prompting him to physically reposition her to obtain the first image. The movement, he testified, caused her to yelp in pain. The app returned a name and photo of a woman named Maria; a match that the agent rated “a maybe.”

Agents called out the name, “Maria, Maria,” to gauge her reaction. When she failed to respond, they took another photo. The agent testified the second result was “possible,” but added, “I don’t know.” Asked what supported probable cause, the agent cited the woman speaking Spanish, her presence with others who appeared to be noncitizens, and a “possible match” via facial recognition. The agent testified that the app did not indicate how confident the system was in a match. “It’s just an image, your honor. You have to look at the eyes and the nose and the mouth and the lips.”

However, rendered here in Motorola’s Watch app, everything looks fun and easy! Motorola (and Polar, I guess) uses Apple’s “close your rings” approach, with active minutes, steps, and calories. I particularly like that you can now use Polar’s sleep tracking with a cheaper Android watch. Polar takes into account sleep time, solidity (whether or not your sleep was interrupted), and regeneration to give you a Nightly Recharge Status.

You can still click through and see your ANS, but there’s a lot more context surrounding it. Also, the graphs are prettier. I compared the sleep, heart rate, and stress measurements to my Oura Ring 4, and I found no big discrepancies. The Moto Watch tended to be a little bit more generous in my sleep and activity measurements (7 hours and 21 minutes of sleep instead of 7 hours and 13 minutes, or 3,807 steps as compared to 3,209), but that’s usual for lower-end fitness trackers that have fewer and less-sensitive sensors.

On that note, I do have one major hardware gripe. Onboard GPS is meant to make it easier to just run out the door and start your watch. I didn’t find this to be the case. Whatever processor is in the watch (Motorola has conveniently chosen not to reveal this), it’s just really slow to connect to satellites and iffy whenever it does. This isn’t a huge deal when I’m just walking my dog or lifting weights in my living room, but it constantly cuts out when I’m outside and doesn’t have the ability to fill in the blanks, as another, more expensive fitness tracker would do.

It’s just really annoying to constantly get pinged about satellite loss and to have a quarter-mile or a half-mile cut out of your runs. That’s how I know the speaker works—it was constantly telling me it lost satellite connection during activities.

Finally, the screen and buttons are really sensitive. It does give you an option to lock the screen, but even then, I found myself accidentally unlocking it from time to time and turning the recording off when I didn’t mean to.

As I write this, I have seven different smartwatches from different brands sitting on my desk. If you’re looking for a cheap, attractive, and effective Android-compatible smartwatch, I would say that the CMF Watch 3 Pro is your best choice. However, I do think the integration with Polar was well done, and the price point is not that bad. I’m definitely keeping an eye out for what Motorola might have to offer in the future.

Compare Our Picks

Others Tested

Closer Pets C200 2-Meal Automatic Pet Feeder for $50: This automatic feeder is super simple, which is both its weakness and its strength. It’s essentially two shallow plastic containers with stainless steel inserts (both dishwasher safe) and tamper-resistant lids that are locked and automatically open using an old-school egg-style timer that runs on a AA battery rather than electricity. Although the container has an ice pack to keep the wet food cool, after one night it lost virtually all of its coolness. There’s a lid-link clip attachment, a small piece of plastic that links the lids to ensure they will open at the same time, which is super helpful for owners of two cats like me. I wish the timer were electric so I could program it to the exact time I want it open, rather than guesstimating the timing on the little marks. However, this is a simple solution to help make sure both my cats are given wet food without me having to wake up at the crack of dawn.

Photograph: Molly Higgins

Oneisall Cordless WiFi Automatic Cat Feeder for $50: I had high hopes for this cordless feeder that boasts a rechargeable battery with a 100-day life and an integrated app, but it’s just too unreliable. Through the app, you can program up to 10 daily meals (in 1-12 portions each), monitor pets’ eating habits, and customize meal calls. Unlike other apps, you’re not able to choose portion size, but instead have to multiply the number of servings. The app gave me constant problems, and would often disconnect from the feeder and be unable to reconnect to WiFi. Luckily, I was able to program meals via the screen and buttons, but it would’ve been a whole lot nicer if the app had worked reliably.

Do Not Recommend

Courtesy of Amazon

Catit Pixi Smart 6-Meal Feeder for $117: Like others on this list, the Catit Pixi wet and dry feeder uses ice packs to keep wet food fresh and rotates the meals in six compartments on a set schedule. The schedule can be programmed via the app or changed on the body of the feeder. At this price point, the app shouldn’t be this limited and glitchy. The schedule is available in military time only, and the app is extremely limited—you can only set the meal schedule for the same day, and when I wanted to do only two to three meals a day spread over two days, I had to reschedule the meals for every new day. The feeder didn’t keep it cold enough to spread the meals out and the wet food was not at a safe eating temperature. At this price point, just get the Petlibro Polar wet feeder for a few bucks more.

Catit Pixi Smart Cat Feeder for $114: Kibble is stored in the body of this dry feeder, but it doesn’t have a window to visually check food levels. The calendar to plan meals shows only a week at a time, and although it should repeat daily based on the schedule, I found that some days there would be no schedule despite setting one up. The Pixi also doesn’t tell you how much food was dispensed; it just refers to it as a “portion”—I manually measured and found the portion was less than a tablespoon of kibble. After using it continuously for more than a month, I found it was extremely glitchy and almost never reliably stuck to the programmed schedule, sometimes skipping meals altogether. This feeder is potentially dangerous, and I’d caution pet parents against relying on it.

Closer Pets C500 for $75: This automatic wet and dry feeder can schedule up to four pre-portioned meals (and one meal given manually) that are opened on a timer system using three AA batteries (sold separately). The user presets the four times they want the bowls, which have ice packs underneath, to rotate. The bowls are quite deep and narrow and aren’t super easy for cats to reach, which could cause whisker fatigue. And although there are two relatively large ice packs, when I checked on the feeder after a night’s sleep, the packs weren’t very cold. This may be OK for kibble, but wet food was kept at unsafe temperatures, and my cats couldn’t reach all of the food.