United States Customs and Border Protection plans to log every person leaving the country by vehicle by taking photos at border crossings of every passenger and matching their faces to their passports, visas, or travel documents, WIRED has learned.
The escalated documentation of travelers could be used to track how many people are self-deporting, or leave the US voluntarily, which the Trump administration is fervently encouraging to people in the country illegally.
CBP exclusively tells WIRED, in response to an inquiry to the agency, that it plans to mirror the current program it’s developing—photographing every person entering the US and match their faces with their travel documents—to the outbound lanes going to Canada and Mexico. The agency currently does not have a system that monitors people leaving the country by vehicle.
“Although we are still working on how we would handle outbound vehicle lanes, we will ultimately expand to this area,” CBP spokesperson Jessica Turner tells WIRED.
Turner could not provide a timeline on when CBP would begin monitoring people leaving the country by vehicle.
She tells WIRED that CBP currently matches photos of people coming into the country with “all documented photos, i.e., passports, visas, green cards, etc,” and adds that all “alien/non-US citizens encounter photos taken at border crossing” are stored by CBP. “The encounter photos can be used for subsequent crossings to verify identity,” Turner says. She did not specify whether CBP may integrate additional photos or data sources in the future.
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