The Shocking Far-Right Agenda Behind the Facial Recognition Tech Used by ICE and the FBI

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/clearview-ai-immigration-ice-fbi-surveillance-facial-recognition-hoan-ton-that-hal-lambert-trump/

One evening in March 2017, Hoan Ton-That, an Australian coder building a powerful facial recognition system, emailed his American business partners with a plan to deploy their fledgling technology. “Border patrol pitch,” the subject line read. He hoped to persuade the federal government to integrate their product with border surveillance cameras so that their newly formed company, later named Clearview AI, could use “face detection” on immigrants entering the United States.

An immigrant to the United States himself, Ton-That grew up in Melbourne and Canberra and claimed to be descended from Vietnamese royalty. At 19, he dropped out of college and, in 2007, moved to San Francisco to pursue a tech career. He later fell in with Silicon Valley neoreactionaries who embraced a far-right, technocratic vision of society. Now Ton-That and his partners wanted to use facial recognition to keep people out of the country. Certain people. Their technology would put that ideology into action.

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.” The lone example he offered was the National Council of La Raza, now called UnidosUS, one of the country’s largest Hispanic civil rights organizations.

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