DHS Wants a Single Search Engine to Flag Faces and Fingerprints Across Agencies

The Department of Homeland Security is moving to consolidate its face recognition and other biometric technologies into a single system capable of comparing faces, fingerprints, iris scans, and other identifiers collected across its enforcement agencies, according to records reviewed by WIRED.

The agency is asking private biometric contractors how to build a unified platform that would let employees search faces and fingerprints across large government databases already filled with biometrics gathered in different contexts. The goal is to connect components including Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Secret Service, and DHS headquarters, replacing a patchwork of tools that do not share data easily.

The system would support watchlisting, detention, or removal operations and comes as DHS is pushing biometric surveillance far beyond ports of entry and into the hands of intelligence units and masked agents operating hundreds of miles from the border.

The records show DHS is trying to buy a single “matching engine” that can take different kinds of biometrics—faces, fingerprints, iris scans, and more—and run them through the same backend, giving multiple DHS agencies one shared system. In theory, that means the platform would handle both identity checks and investigative searches.

For face recognition specifically, identity verification means the system compares one photo to a single stored record and returns a yes-or-no answer based on similarity. For investigations, it searches a large database and returns a ranked list of the closest-looking faces for a human to review instead of independently making a call.

Both types of searches come with real technical limits. In identity checks, the systems are more sensitive, and so they are less likely to wrongly flag an innocent person. They will, however, fail to identify a match when the photo submitted is slightly blurry, angled, or outdated. For investigative searches, the cutoff is considerably lower, and while the system is more likely to include the right person somewhere in the results, it also produces many more false positives that necessitate human review.

The documents make clear that DHS wants control over how strict or permissive a match should be—depending on the context.

The department also wants the system wired directly into its existing infrastructure. Contractors would be expected to connect the matcher to current biometric sensors, enrollment systems, and data repositories so information collected in one DHS component can be searched against records held by another.

It’s unclear how workable this is. Different DHS agencies have bought their biometric systems from different companies over many years. Each system turns a face or fingerprint into a string of numbers, but many are designed only to work with the specific software that created them.

In practice, this means a new department-wide search tool cannot simply “flip a switch” and make everything compatible. DHS would likely have to convert old records into a common format, rebuild them using a new algorithm, or create software bridges that translate between systems. All of these approaches take time and money, and each can affect speed and accuracy.

At the scale DHS is proposing—potentially billions of records—even small compatibility gaps can spiral into large problems.

The documents also contain a placeholder indicating DHS wants to incorporate voiceprint analysis, but it contains no detailed plans for how they would be collected, stored, or searched. The agency previously used voiceprints in its “Alternative to Detention” program, which allowed immigrants to remain in their communities but required them to submit to intensive monitoring, including GPS ankle trackers and routine check-ins that confirmed their identity using biometric voiceprints.