Immigration And Customs Enforcement Agency

Amazon would really like U.S. law enforcement to use its facial-recognition software, despite how its employees feel.

According to internal documents obtained by the Project on Government Oversight, Amazon met with officials from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over the summer in order to pitch facial-recognition technology known as Rekognition.

In June 2018, Amazon Web Services sales representatives met with ICE officials to discuss the government agency’s use of the face-scanning technology. In an email to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations that followed, Amazon sent “action items” which included “Rekognition Video tagging/analysis, scalability, custom object libraries.” The Amazon sales representative went on to thank the agency for its interest in using the company’s technology “to support ICE and the HSI mission.” Read more…

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If you’re an undocumented immigrant stuck in one of America’s more than 1,478 immigration detention centers, your only connection to the country might be the Legal Aid lawyer chosen to represent you in court. That’s if you’re lucky enough to have legal representation, which isn’t a guarantee.

Some of those detained have no one in America waiting for them — forget anyone willing to listen.

That’s why pen pal programs to immigrants stuck in detention — conducted jointly by HIAS and Freedom for Immigrants, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS), and multiple other nonprofits spanning the country — have taken off in recent months, advocates told Mashable. Letter writing provides these immigrants one of the most crucial social services around: an emotional connection to the outside, increasingly hostile, world. Read more…

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