Immigration Biometrics: 30,000 Officials Can Search Prints

Picture a woman sitting at a routine immigration appointment. She rests her fingers on a glass scanner, and an officer tells her it's just a background check. What she doesn't know is that those prints may now be searchable by about thirty thousand government users.

If you've ever given your fingerprints for a job, a

If you've ever given your fingerprints for a job, a visa, or a trip abroad, this story could include you. And if that feels unsettling, that's a fair reaction. Most of us assume a fingerprint goes into one folder for one purpose. The reality is more connected than that, and it's rarely explained at the appointment. So how does one set of fingerprints end up in so many places?

Start with the main system. It's called IDENT, and the Department of Homeland Security runs it. It holds fingerprints, palm prints, facial images, and iris scans. Those records cover travelers entering and leaving the country, visa applicants, refugees, asylum seekers, and naturalized citizens. Each new encounter adds a record, and the record stays.

Now the part that surprises people. After the September eleventh attacks, legislation pushed IDENT to connect with the F.B.I.'s criminal fingerprint system, called N.G.I. That means a print in one system can be checked against the other. It's one connected pipeline, not two separate filing cabinets.

Here's how the handoff works. According to F.B.I. documentation, when N.G.I. gets a match from IDENT, it automatically sends a query to Immigration and Customs Enforcement about that person's status. If there's no match but the person seems to be a non-citizen, N.G.I. sends a query to I.C.E. anyway. No warrant is involved, and nobody is notified.

For a local police department, that's convenient

For a local police department, that's convenient. For the person being fingerprinted, it means a search they never knew about can start from a completely unrelated event.

And the prints aren't the only thing collected. According to the American Friends Service Committee, a newer system called HART is designed to handle at least seven kinds of biometric data. That includes fingerprints, iris scans, D.N.A., face and voice recognition, scars and tattoos, and a catch-all category for other methods. That's a lot more than a fingertip on glass.

The sharing also crosses borders. The Migration Five countries are the U.K., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the U.S. According to the U.K. Home Office, partners in that group exchange about three thousand fingerprint records each per year. Those are mostly refugee claimants and foreign nationals facing enforcement action.

Picture giving one photo to a museum. Instead of hanging on one wall, it's copied and sent to hundreds of other museums. It's compared against millions of other images, and you're never told when someone new looks at it. That's the closest picture of how this network behaves.