When agents came to his workplace armed with guns, gas canisters, and artificial intelligence, Abdikafi Abdurahman Abdullahi, known as Kafi, fought back with quick wit and street smarts. The Somali American engineer-turned-Uber driver is one of the few people willing to speak publicly about being subjected to the Department of Homeland Security’s new facial recognition tool, Mobile Fortify, offering a preview of what routine facial recognition could look like on American streets.
Abdullahi was waiting for a fare in a Minneapolis airport rideshare lot January 7, just hours after Renée Good was shot and killed by federal agents elsewhere in the city. As he watched a video of her death on his phone, there was a knock on his car door. Outside stood roughly a dozen ICE agents, demanding proof of his citizenship.
“I was like, oh, if they killed that young woman and she’s white, then they’re sending a message out, which is it’s game on for everybody,” Abdullahi said.
Abdullahi, who is Black and Muslim, refused to show his ID, arguing that he was being racially profiled. Instead, he began filming, and his unflappable, mischievous comebacks transformed his video into a viral sensation.
As Abdullahi filmed, an agent told him, “I can hear you don’t have the same accent as me.”
“So I should sound like a 6-foot white guy?” Abdullahi later joked. “It’s not possible scientifically.”
Abdullahi became a US citizen in 2016. He moved to the United States at 17 after his family fled Somalia during the civil war. He holds a mechanical engineering degree from Washington State University and recently began working as an Uber driver to help pay off his student loans.
At one point, then–Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino joined the officers encircling Abdullahi’s car, asking whether he was an “illegal alien.” Abdullahi jokingly responded that he might be “from another planet.”
“I knew what they were doing,” he said. “They were stalling me so that they could get more data.”
In video of the confrontation, an officer raises his cellphone and scans Abdullahi. He’s using Mobile Fortify, an app that allows officers to photograph a person’s face and immediately query DHS databases for matches against passport records, visa files, and border entry photos.
But according to Abdullahi, Mobile Fortify misidentified him and pulled up a profile for someone named “Ali.” Facial recognition technology is notoriously error prone and has long been criticized for inaccuracies when identifying people of color. Mobile Fortify has been shrouded in secrecy, and DHS has not publicly disclosed its error rate.
Officers attempted to scan Abdullahi again. By then, a small crowd of spectators had gathered and were also filming the confrontation as Abdullahi continued to heckle the agents. When officers were unable to positively identify Abdullahi, they eventually gave up and walked away.
DHS declined to answer questions about Abdullahi’s experience and his claim that he was racially profiled and misidentified.
I’ve been covering the surveillance technology industry for some time, with a particular focus on the human rights risks posed by unchecked facial recognition tools.
In 2023, while directing my documentary Your Face Is Ours about facial recognition firm Clearview AI for France 24, I filmed with border agents at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. At the time, Francis J. Russo, director of field operations for US Customs and Border Protection’s New York office, insisted that the agency takes privacy concerns seriously and does not “store the data in our systems for US citizens for more than 12 hours.”
But that assurance stands in stark contrast with what court filings reveal about DHS’s Mobile Fortify app.
According to documents filed in a lawsuit by the state of Illinois and city of Chicago against DHS, the agency “retains all biometric information taken using the Mobile Fortify app, including that of US citizens, for 15 years.”
Until recently, DHS had not publicly acknowledged the existence of Mobile Fortify. Journalist Joseph Cox reported on the app in June, but the agency did not confirm its deployment until January, when it quietly listed it in its 2025 AI Use Case Inventory. The inventory revealed that agents had been using the app in the field since May. It also showed the scope of the tool, noting that agents can use it to collect both fingerprints and iris scans.
The inventory also contained the first official confirmation that the app relies on technology developed by Japanese multinational corporation NEC. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
By the time DHS publicly disclosed the existence of Mobile Fortify, it already had been used more than 100,000 times since its launch, according to court filings.
DHS declined to answer detailed questions about how Mobile Fortify is being used. In a written statement, the agency said: “Mobile Fortify is a lawful law-enforcement tool developed under the Trump Administration to support accurate identity and immigration-status verification during enforcement operations.”
Civil liberties advocates say Mobile Fortify marks a dramatic escalation.
“What we’ve never seen before this year is a law enforcement agency putting face recognition technology on law enforcement agents’ phones out in the community and giving them unchecked power to stop people, pull them off the street, and start scanning their faces,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. “It is deeply dangerous. It’s irresponsible, it’s unprecedented, and it’s illegal.”
The ACLU recently filed a class-action lawsuit against DHS targeting a broad array of surveillance tactics. Hussen v. Noem alleges that agents are conducting suspicionless stops, warrantless arrests, and face scans based on perceived race and ethnicity.
Advocates like Wessler are now seeing facial recognition technology and other surveillance tools used not only to verify immigration status, but also to identify and track Americans who protest ICE or criticize the agency.
“This is taking a big and very scary step toward a kind of totalitarian checkpoint society that we have always professed to abhor here in the United States,” Wessler said.
A video recorded in Maine in January captured an ICE observer being filmed by an agent who told her that DHS had “a nice little database” and she was now “considered a domestic terrorist.”
“Documenting ICE activity and protesting against it is a right protected by the First Amendment,” Wessler said. “Retaliation for doing so goes against the Constitution.”
In Minneapolis, protesters at the scene of Alex Pretti’s fatal shooting described what they see as an expanding digital dragnet.
“It’s dystopian. It’s like Black Mirror stuff,” one masked protester told me. “They’re using facial recognition, every advanced tool that they have to try and identify protesters and squash what we’re doing.”
“It’s un-American,” another said.
In October, DHS quietly removed a Biden-era policy from its website that outlined oversight and privacy safeguards for facial recognition and other biometric tools. It has yet to publish a replacement framework clarifying what guardrails, if any, now govern their use. In early February, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and other Democratic lawmakers announced the ICE Out of Our Faces Act to “stop this unaccountable, authoritarian use of facial recognition technologies.”
DHS is now looking to consolidate its various facial recognition and fingerprint databases into a single biometric platform, according to recent reporting by Wired. And in February, reports emerged that data analytics firm Palantir landed a new five-year, $1 billion software purchase agreement with DHS.
“We’ve seen DHS amassing a wide range of surveillance software. Some of it’s not new, but the way it’s being deployed is new,” Wessler said. “Cellphone location data harvested from apps on people’s phones, cellphone tracking tools called stingrays, license plate readers, social media monitoring software, and systems like Palantir that bring all of these together in one easily searchable place.”
Since Abdullahi’s video went viral, he has become something of a folk hero. Strangers recognize him in the street. Teenagers ask for selfies. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) visited to thank him for his bravery. And a Norwegian Parliament member asked him to contribute to a video nominating the people of Minneapolis for the Nobel Peace Prize.
He has a message for President Donald Trump, who has been vocal about craving his own Peace Prize: Stop picking on Somali Americans.
“We don’t submit easily,” he said. “We’ve been through tyrants way worse.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.