"The Shocking Far-Right Agenda Behind the Facial Recognition Tech Used by ICE and the FBI", 7 April 2025

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Clearview had compiled a massive biometric database that would eventually contain billions of images the company scraped off the internet and social media without the knowledge of the platforms or their users. Its AI analyzed these images, creating a “faceprint” for every individual. The company let users run a “probe photo” against its database, and if it generated a hit, it displayed the matching images and links to the websites where they originated. This made it easy for Clearview users to further profile their targets with other information found on those webpages: religious or political affiliation, family and friends, romantic partners, sexuality. All without a search warrant or probable cause.

A diehard Donald Trump supporter, Ton-That envisioned using facial recognition to compare images of migrants crossing the border to mugshots to see if the arrivals had been previously arrested in the United States. His Border Patrol pitch also included a proposal to screen any arrival for “sentiment about the USA.” Here, Ton-That appeared to conflate support for the Republican leader with American identity, proposing to scan migrants’ social media for “posts saying ‘I hate Trump’ or ‘Trump is a puta’” and targeting anyone with an “affinity for far-left groups.” ...

By the end of Trump’s first presidential term, Clearview had secured funding from right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, one of Elon Musk’s earliest business partners, and signed up hundreds of law enforcement clients around the country. The company doled out free trials to hook users, urging cops to “run wild” with searches. They did. Many departments then bought licenses to access Clearview’s faceprint database.

Since Clearview’s existence first came to light in 2020, the secretive company has attracted outsize controversy for its dystopian privacy implications. ...

Clearview’s business model is based on “weaponizing our own images against us without a license, without consent, without permission,” says Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.

In December, Ton-That, the face of Clearview since it was forced from the shadows, quietly stepped down as CEO and took on the role of president. In February, he abruptly resigned his new position, though he retains a board seat. When Mother Jones wrote Ton-That, who is now the chief technology officer at Architect Capital, a San Francisco-based investment firm, with questions for this story, he replied: “There are inaccuracies and errors contained in these assertions. They do not merif [sic] further response.” Ton-That refused to elaborate. Clearview declined to comment.

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Clearview is already well positioned to capitalize on Trump’s xenophobic plans. Today, one of the company’s top customers is US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a relationship cemented during Joe Biden’s presidency, as the agency inked bigger deals with the startup. Under the Biden administration, ICE records show, the agency deployed Clearview widely, even as officials there charged with monitoring the technology were in the dark about how it was being used and by whom. As the agency executes Trump’s emboldened mission—“Border Czar” Tom Homan has vowed to unleash “shock and awe” against undocumented immigrants—the dragnet surveillance outlined by Ton-That during the company’s earliest years may already be underway. (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.)

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Immigrants aren’t the only people at risk. With Trump pursuing “retribution” against his political enemies, Clearview offers a range of frightening applications. “It creates a really disturbingly powerful tool for police that can identify nearly every person at a protest or a reproductive health facility or a house of worship with just photos of those people’s faces,” says Cahn.

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I’ve reported on Clearview for years. This story, based on interviews with insiders and thousands of newly obtained emails, texts, and other records, including internal ICE communications, provides the fullest account to date of the extent of the company’s far-right origins and of the implementation of its facial recognition technology within the federal government’s immigration enforcement apparatus. It reveals how Ton-That, who obsessed over race, IQ, and hierarchy, solicited input from eugenicists and right-wing extremists while building Clearview, and how, from the outset, he and his associates discussed deploying the tech against immigrants, people of color, and the political left. All told, this new reporting paints a chilling portrait of an ideologically driven company whose powerful surveillance technology is now in the hands of the Trump administration, as it bulldozes democratic institutions and executes an authoritarian takeover.

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... Ton-That’s path to radicalization began earlier than he let on, and his extremism was no fleeting dalliance. By 2015, he was interacting online with alt-right activists, including Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich. Deleted social media posts also show him chatting with extremists such as Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, the longtime webmaster of the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website. (Auernheimer, who has a large swastika tattoo and has repeatedly called for a genocide of Jews, denied to Mother Jones that he holds neo-Nazi views and claimed he was no longer involved with the Daily Stormer. He also said he never interacted with Ton-That but declined to address evidence of their communications.)

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Re: Clearview’s Agenda

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...The breakthrough at ICE gave the company a foothold in the federal government. It also brought Johnson and Ton-That’s original vision closer to fruition. As Johnson bombastically described their early mission on Facebook, they were “building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads.” Now, the company had found a willing partner in ICE, which has a history of racial and religious profiling, violating constitutional rights, and invasive data gathering and surveillance.

Since 2016, the agency’s employees and contractors have faced hundreds of internal investigations for misusing various databases of personal information. Department watchdogs investigated ICE employees and contractors for allegedly looking up each other and former lovers, giving information to friends and neighbors, and accessing databases in order to threaten and harass people or sell information to criminals, according to a 2023 Wired report.

Experts believe Clearview is likely already involved in deportation. “If Clearview AI tries to scrape all social media from all around the world, and there is a picture of an immigrant to the United States, then ICE could try to find out who that person is,” says Jack Poulson of Tech Inquiry, a watchdog group. “The company emphasizes the use within human trafficking and drug trafficking, but it’s highly unlikely that they would not be actively supporting deportation.”

Indeed, starting in mid-2019, ICE clandest­inely­ piloted the tech through, among other units, its Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) division, which arrests and deports undocumented immigrants. A BuzzFeed News investigation found that ICE agents ran more than 8,000 searches during this period.

Records obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and shared with Mother Jones indicate that ICE has mainly used Clearview in its Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division, which traditionally conducts criminal probes into human trafficking and drug smuggling. But during Trump’s first term, HSI agents were deeply involved in deportation actions alongside ERO teams, participating in aggressive raids in sanctuary cities and sometimes arresting hundreds of undocumented workers in a day. Now, the units are teaming up again to round up immigrants.

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The EPIC records reveal a culture of indifference at ICE about Clearview’s privacy and civil rights implications. It was a fancy toy that promised a low-cost investigative shortcut. ...

The EPIC files also show that ICE supervisors had little idea how Clearview was being used and struggled to determine which units and agents had access. ERO and HSI had Clearview. But so did task force officers outside of ICE who work with federal law enforcement. More than 100 people connected to the agency were using Clearview around the world in places like Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Rome; Manila, Philippines; and Ton-That’s hometown of Canberra.

During the Biden administration, demand for Clearview surged within ICE. On March 25, 2022, the agency held a “Clearview expansion meeting.” Lambert has said the bulk of the company’s $16 million in annual recurring revenue still comes from local law enforcement, but ICE has been Clearview’s steadiest customer, paying the facial recognition firm nearly $4 million.

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Sejal Zota, co-founder and legal director of Just Futures Law, a civil rights group that helped bring the suit, predicts facial recognition will be used even more widely during Trump’s second term. “We expect to see [it] extend from Trump’s alleged targets—immigrants—to the general public.”

In March 2024, the US Commission on Civil Rights convened experts at its headquarters near the White House to discuss the dangers of facial recognition. While immigrants were most at risk, privacy advocates told the commission, they were just the initial target. ... Something had to be done, the privacy advocates agreed, before it was too late. But it was already awfully late. Facial recognition technology was thoroughly embedded in the nation’s surveillance infrastructure.

Sitting placidly at the panelists’ table, his long black hair spilling to the shoulders of his gray suit jacket, was one of the people most responsible for that outcome.

“As a person of mixed race,” Ton-That told the commission, “it is especially important to me that this technology is deployed in a way that protects and enhances civil rights.”

Information about Clearview’s ties to extremists was already public, but Ton-That faced not a single question about his background. Nor was he asked how, as a class-action lawsuit against the company alleged, violating Illinois law by collecting the “biometric identifiers and biometric information” of citizens without informing them was compatible with civil rights. In September, the commission issued a 194-page report that failed to mention Clearview’s radical associations.

The report did acknowledge, however, one of the achievements that Ton-That has trumpeted the most, including before the commission. Clearview, he said, had “played an essential role” in helping investigate the violent insurrectionists who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, an incident he described elsewhere as “tragic and appalling.” The attack had proved an enormous publicity boon for Clearview—and an opportunity to scrub the far-right taint from its image. In media interviews, Ton-That touted Clearview’s ability to track down MAGA criminals. The company published a case study on its website highlighting its role in the “arrest of hundreds of rioters in a short amount of time.”

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It was a startling admission. Clearview’s code of conduct prohibits use of the tech for “personal purposes.” But here was Duke talking about running off-the-books searches in an effort to whitewash an attack on American democracy.

“All of the evidence we have is that [Clearview] is a corporation that cares not at all about civil rights and that their founders have a potentially ideological agenda inconsistent with democracy,” says Emily Tucker, executive director of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology. “None of that has seemed to slow down their ability to get government contracts in the US or abroad.”

Nobody in a position to hold the company accountable seemed to care about its far-right DNA—and few wanted to consider that the threat to privacy and democracy might not be an unfortunate by-product of the tech, but rather a feature. Tucker said her organization discussed Clearview’s extremist ties with several Biden administration officials, as well as congressional staffers, and she was surprised and concerned by the lack of follow-up. Most media coverage of the company left the issue unmentioned or, worse, downplayed what was known—one interviewer for the financial magazine Inc. described the extremists at Clearview as “rogue employees” who had “infiltrated the company.”

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Today, there is no longer a need for Clearview to pretend to be apolitical. Lambert, the company’s new co-CEO, is already in business with both Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the Department of Defense through a separate satellite company, and he has made no secret of his desire to deploy Clearview as an instrument of MAGA rule. “Under the Trump administration, we would hope to grow more than we were able to under the Biden administration,” he told Forbes. “We’re talking to the [Pentagon], we’re talking to Homeland Security. There are a number of different agencies we’re in active dialogue with.”

In the emails I obtained, Lambert expressed a desire to “take down these lefties” and railed against the “communist academia left.” Unlike his predecessor, who at least paid lip service to the rule of law after January 6, Lambert helped to gin up unscientific and inaccurate analyses of voter data that Republicans used to back false claims of voter fraud after the 2020 election.

Even before the leadership shakeup became public, it was evident to the careful observer that changes were afoot at Clearview in anticipation of the new administration. Days before Trump was again sworn in as president, vowing to pardon the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol in his name, the company updated its website. Deleted were any references to its role in identifying the far-right marauders who had laid siege to democracy.