René Rodriguez accompanied his daughter to Ireland last month as she prepared for a fall semester abroad. As he boarded the flight from Boston Logan International Airport to Shannon Airport, he found two federal officers in the Jetway taking photos of passengers with their cellphones.
“It was an ambush,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “It really caught me by surprise, and really I felt violated in a lot of ways, because I didn’t give permission.”
Those officers were part of an expanding federal program called biometric exit, which involves taking photos of passengers leaving the country and applying facial recognition technology to ensure that travelers match their identification documents. This process is known as facial comparison.
For foreign nationals, the photos can remain in a database for up to 75 years. For U.S. citizens, the photos are matched to their passports and deleted within 12 hours, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
On Sept. 15, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs approved a proposed rule, clearing the way for the program to expand to all airports, seaports and land crossings across the country.
While the approval formalized the expansion, in reality the program has been growing for years and is now in use at dozens of airports and at seaports. It has not yet been put in place at most points of entry on land, but the rule will permit that as well, said Daniel P. Tanciar, a deputy director at U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Mr. Tanciar said that the process usually takes place at the airport boarding gate, using a camera on a stick bought by the airlines. For some smaller foreign airlines, C.B.P. will provide officers with cellphones equipped with a specific application to take the photos in place of the machines.
Keith Jeffries, the former federal security director of Los Angeles International Airport, said that because people’s appearances can change from the time they take their passport photos, biometric exit is a way to double-check a passenger’s identity. But, he said, the presence of federal agents in the Jetway seemed “strange.”
“Anytime you have federal agents in a Jetway, that is not common,” Mr. Jeffries said.
Today, 52 percent of departing air travelers are “biometrically confirmed,” according to Mr. Tanciar. Since June 2017, 810 million people have undergone the process; as of this month, 500,000 foreign nationals who have overstayed visas have been confirmed using this process, Mr. Tanciar said.
U.S. citizens can opt out and request to be verified manually by showing their passport to the C.B.P. officers or gate agents at the gate and undergoing a visual facial comparison.
Mr. Rodriguez said that an agent told him that in order to opt out, he would have to wait until others had boarded, which made him fear missing his flight. Mr. Tanciar stressed that biometric exit is quick and that the goal is not to delay flights or passengers.
The reliance on facial recognition concerns privacy experts like Jeramie Scott, a lawyer with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based nonprofit. Facial recognition is prone to false positives, he said, particularly for people of color and women. He said the program also risks “mission creep” — the idea that the photos could be used for more than biometric exit.
“The main reason they’re using facial recognition is because it’s easy,” he said. “And it’s very easy to expand its use, and there are no overarching regulations in place to protect us in a meaningful way from its expansion.”
Regarding privacy concerns, Mr. Tanciar noted that air travelers have long been required to provide photo identification and that passport photos have always been on file with the government.
“The systems in place are secure,” he said.
But privacy worries unsettled Lorey Cavanaugh, 72, when an agent took her picture as she boarded a flight from Boston to Shannon this month. She regretted not asking questions or requesting to opt out. Ms. Cavanaugh, a U.S. citizen from Connecticut, said that she travels to Ireland multiple times a year and had not experienced this before.
“I’m mad at myself that I didn’t say something,” she said. “But it didn’t seem safe, frankly, to stop and have a conversation.”
Biometric entry, which usually involves foreign nationals providing photos and fingerprints upon entering the United States, has been in use since January 2004, but biometric exit has taken longer to put in place. Both programs were recommended by the 9/11 commission report, which was released in 2004.
President Barack Obama explored options for biometric exit, and according to Mr. Tanciar, a trial took place in Atlanta in 2016.
The system gathered momentum after President Trump’s 2017 executive order, known as the “Muslim ban,” which also required D.H.S. to expedite “a biometric entry-exit tracking system.”
The rule approved last week noted that the earlier regulations only allowed for biometric exit at “15 airports and seaports.” In the five years since the rule was first proposed, the number of airports has increased to 57, according to D.H.S.
The presence of federal agents taking photos has confused some travelers. Mr. Rodriguez and Ms. Cavanaugh, who both traveled on Aer Lingus, said they thought the officers they encountered were members of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but D.H.S. said they were C.B.P. officers.
The initial impression by both travelers spoke to the anxiety rippling through airports nationwide as they become front lines in the current administration’s immigration crackdown. Mr. Rodriguez said the experience, even as someone born and raised in Connecticut, unnerved him.
“I’m also Latino. I see what they’re doing to people who look like me. It can be very intimidating,” he said.
Mr. Tanciar emphasized that what Mr. Rodriguez experienced is no cause for alarm, particularly as more travelers could start to see similar setups as the program expands.
“It is absolutely normal, absolutely possible that a C.B.P. officer or team of C.B.P. officers may be at your gate using their mobile phones to take photographs,” he said. “It is different than what they have experienced, but it is not certainly anything new or unusual or anything they should be concerned about.”
Lauren McCarthy contributed reporting.
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