Newly released body-camera footage shows US immigration officers stopping a van of farm workers in Oregon, smashing their windows and using facial recognition software to try to identify one of them.

Videos from a 30 October 2025 operation were disclosed in court as part of an ongoing class-action lawsuit challenging Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) arrest tactics and racial profiling by agents. Lawyers for one of the detained farm workers shared the footage with the Guardian.

The officers did not have warrants to detain the workers, and a federal judge later said the arrests appeared to be unlawful and unjustified.

The footage shows an agent using his phone to capture the face of one of the detained workers, and agents later admitted in court that they used a facial recognition app during the operation. The case provides a window into ICE’s expanding use of this surveillance technology across the US, which has raised significant privacy and civil liberties concerns, particularly since the app can yield inaccurate results.

In the early morning on the day the footage was filmed, a team of ICE agents surveilled an apartment complex in Woodburn, a city south of Portland and home to many agricultural workers. An officer identified in court as JB later testified that the agents had chosen that location in part based on data surfaced from an ICE mobile app called Elite, which was built by the tech firm Palantir. The agent said the app helps officers find areas where they might find “targets” to potentially detain.

Agents decided to follow a white van leaving the apartment complex after running license plates and discovering the van’s owner was potentially an immigrant in the US without authorization, JB said. The officer said in court they did not confirm whether the driver of the van was, in fact, the vehicle’s owner, but that he felt it was suspicious the driver was making multiple stops for passengers: “You don’t know if it’s human trafficking or smuggling.”

Lawyers with Innovation Law Lab, an immigrant rights’ non-profit that filed the class-action and represented one of the farm workers, said the van was simply carpooling to a job site.

The body-cam video starts when officers pull over the van. It was around 5.30am and still dark out. Lawyers shared footage with the occupants’ faces blurred to protect their privacy.

“Bust it! Bust it!” one of the officers said, referring to the van’s windows. An officer then shouted commands in Spanish to open the window, but within seconds, shattered the van’s side window before occupants could comply.

A 45-year-old woman visible in the footage, identified as MJMA, is a farm worker and lead plaintiff in the lawsuit. The video captured her asserting her rights to remain silent, saying in Spanish, “We don’t have to answer,” and indicating she wanted a lawyer. She also instructed the others in the car not to speak as she called 911.

An officer identified in court as CM, whose body camera was recording the encounter, then said to another officer on scene: “She wants to lawyer up. She doesn’t want to identify herself, we’ll just take her.”

While MJMA was on the phone with 911 asking to speak to a Spanish-speaking dispatcher, an officer demanded she turn her phone off.

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When the woman didn’t exit the car, CM said, “We gotta get them out. They’re on the phone, making … calls and stuff.”

He then grabbed MJMA and took her out of the car as she said in Spanish: “This can’t happen to us! They’re using force. No, no, no!” The officer then broke her phone, she later testified. The seven occupants of the car were then detained – six handcuffed and forced to sit on the pavement lined up against a wall, and an older woman detained on a bench.

“What a lovely bunch of people!” one of the officers shouted.

‘Inaccurate’ facial scans

As the farm workers sat along the wall, the video shows one agent pulling out his phone and holding it close to one man’s face, while another officer shone a bright flashlight on the man’s face. The agent held the phone up for about 12 seconds while the phone appeared to be scanning the man’s image.

Later in the video, one of the officers was heard saying: “Mobile Fortify couldn’t find him.”

Mobile Fortify is the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) facial recognition app, which officers use to scan the faces of individuals, cross-referencing it with various databases to try to identify them.

DR, an agent involved in the Woodburn arrests, was asked about the app in court and acknowledged he didn’t know what databases it used and didn’t know the rate of accuracy, saying: “I’m not certain on the technical aspects.”

A female agent on the scene, identified as MK, testified that she did a “facial recognition mobile query” on MJMA, which led to a match with a “very … similar person”. The agent, however, said: “I wasn’t sure if it was her or not.” The match was a woman named Maria, the agent said. The agents then started saying the name, “Maria” to see if MJMA might respond, but she didn’t, the agent testified.

The woman’s name is not Maria.

The agent did another facial scan of MJMA and it came up with a different match, according to MK’s testimony. But MJMA continued to stay silent.

The agent testified that she believed MJMA “was in the country illegally” because she was only speaking Spanish and due to the “possible match” from facial recognition. Her scanning of MJMA was not caught on the body-cam footage.

During cross-examination, CM, the only agent who recorded body-cam footage, acknowledged he did not know the identity of any passengers when the officers stopped the van. The agent JB also revealed in court that his team was given a verbal order to target eight arrests per day, providing rare insight into DHS arrest quotas.

Four of the people detained from the van were later deported, according to a DHS spokesperson.

Nelly Garcia Orjuela, Innovation Law Lab staff attorney, said MJMA had an ongoing asylum case.

US judge Mustafa Kasubhai ruled against ICE in February in the class-action suit led by MJMA. He said officers had engaged in “misconduct” in Oregon and issued a preliminary decision broadly restricting agents in the state from arresting people without warrants.

Kasubhai noted that officers had made inaccurate statements in their reports about the Woodburn encounter, including falsely saying MJMA had entered the US unlawfully when she had arrived with a valid temporary visa. He said the claims of possible “smuggling” were “unfounded”, and noted that ICE’s reports inaccurately called the stop “consensual”.

The judge was also critical of the officers’ use of the facial recognition technology, saying it relied on data that “can be inaccurate and produce individuals who are here in accordance with immigration laws”.

The judge further said that in the Woodburn stop, officers “did not provide any meaningfully reasonable time for the driver to comply with his commands before shattering the driver side window”.

DHS did not respond to questions about the officers’ use of facial recognition during the arrests, but a spokesperson said in a statement that Mobile Fortify was a “lawful law-enforcement tool developed under the Trump administration to support accurate identity and immigration-status verification during enforcement operations”.

The app queries “limited” immigration datasets from Customs and Border Protection and “operates with a deliberately high matching threshold”, the spokesperson said. The app is used “in accordance with all applicable legal authorities”, the statement added. The Elite app, the spokesperson said, “centralizes information” from multiple federal agencies, allowing officers in the field to check individuals’ immigration status and criminal records.

The DHS spokesperson further defended ICE’s practice of arresting people without warrants, saying “officers use ‘reasonable suspicion’ to investigate immigration status and probable cause to make arrests” and that it had the support of the US supreme court. The statement said the seven people detained in Woodburn were undocumented and three of the workers who were deported had “accepted voluntary departure”. Those removed, the statement said, “received full due process”.

The Department of Justice did not respond to inquiries about the case.

Garcia Orjuela said the videos showed the brutality of ICE’s arrest strategies, with agents immediately smashing windows and bypassing people’s fundamental legal protections. “MJMA asserted her right to remain silent and was advising the other passengers in the car. The officers didn’t like that. It makes them do their job.” She added: “You have to know who you’re targeting before you arrest somebody. That is how due process works.”

Stephen Manning, Innovation Law Lab’s executive director, said the footage illustrated ICE’s “arrest first, justify later” tactics and praised MJMA for calmly defending her rights: “She knew the law better than the agents. She asked them to follow the law, and they actually violated the law [in response]. This never should have happened.”

Maanvi Singh contributed reporting