News and insight into biometric identification and authentication

ICE program success sees expansion in Texas

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with U.S. Representative Henry Cueller have announced that success with ICE’s biometric-enabled Secure Communities program will see an expansion of the initiative to an additional twelve counties in South Texas. The Secure Communities program is designed to remove illegal citizens living in the U.S. if they have been convicted of a crime by tracking biometric information of those entering the country.


The criminals with illegal immigration status are discovered through joint efforts between ICE, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Fingerprint records from criminal booking at prisons is compared with records in the FBI databases and biometric records kept by the Department of Homeland security of those legally in the U.S. So far the program launched in June 2009 in Laredo, Texas, has successfully removed more than 20,000 convicted criminal aliens. ICE is hoping for nationwide enrollment in the program by 2013. [end] 

Texas Instruments (TI) introduced a pair of encapsulated RFID mini-transponders designed for applications in animal tagging and asset tracking.

The 12mm TRPGR30TGC and TRPGP40TGC mini-transponders were developed to enable users a battery-free solution for embedding RFID tags into smaller objects across a broader range of applications. These transponders come ready-to-use and are 100 percent backwards compatible with all of TI’s RFID software and readers including power modules, control modules and micro readers.

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KT Corporation, Korea’s largest teleco, is predicting that 20 million NFC-enabled phones will be in the hands of South Koreans by the end of 2012 – accounting for nearly 40% of the country’s total population, according to NFC World.

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The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency is working together with Unisys Corp. on a Land Border Integration (LBI) project to deploy one of the first pedestrian border crossings in El Paso, Texas.

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Human Recognition Systems (HRS) has added features and enhancements to its MForce latent fingerprint processing product.

In an effort to reduce operation times and costs, HRS has developed MForce as a mobile biometric product that enables law enforcement officers and military to obtain and process latent and livescan fingerprints in the field. By processing prints onsite, users are able to quickly provide investigators with intelligence.

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The biometric program at HMP Isis prison in London requires inmates to authenticate their identities via thumbprint before moving from one area to the next. System errors, however, have been leading to back-ups that leads to all prisoners waiting before they can move on, according to an article from The Telegraph.

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As part of the U.S. Department of State’s initiative to simplify and streamline customer service interactions and processes, the Office of Passport Services has started a 90-day pilot program for online passport card applications.

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