The US wants to use facial recognition to identify migrant children as they age

As Boyd explained at a conference in June, the key question for OBIM is, "If we pick up someone from Panama at the southern border at age four, say, and then pick them up at age six, are we going to recognize them?" Facial recognition technology (FRT) has traditionally not been applied to children, largely because training data sets of real children's faces are few and far between, and consist of either low-quality images drawn from the internet or small sample sizes with little diversity. Such limitations reflect the significant sensitivities regarding privacy and consent when it comes to minors. According to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), 339,234 children arrived at the US-Mexico border in 2022, the last year for which numbers are currently available. Of those children, 150,000 were unaccompanied--the highest annual number on record.