The American government has announced that they will be prioritizing the use of artificial intelligence (AI) at the Mexican border, claiming that they will be deploying the controversial technology to root out potential criminals and prevent them from entry. 

The DHS (Department of Homeland Security) has confirmed, in a statement, that AI will be the key tool to help them with the ongoing illegal drug crisis and will be essential in helping them investigate crimes. 

“We consider there to be tremendous promise in the use of AI to advance our mission,” said DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas at an Axios event in Washington, D.C., Tuesday.

The technology will deploy facial recognition software to identify wanted criminals. 

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And the DHS secretary said that the technology can also help them root out actual vehicles containing narcotics — sometimes in as little as 1.4 seconds. 

He called the technology essential for counteracting the effects of drug trafficking, and called its deployment “responsible.”

“We have a responsibility to facilitate lawful trade and travel, there’s a tremendous amount of legal trade and travel coming through our ports of entry. And so the faster that we can make decisions, the faster we can identify anomalies,” Mayorkas said.

Finally, according to Mayorkas, artificial intelligence will be used to not only identify criminals — but victims too. 

The AI technology has been used, with some success, to identify victims of CSA (child sexual abuse) and human trafficking. 

By using facial enhancement technology, the DHS can use age progression to find women who have been trafficked into the illegal sex trade. 

“We engage the machine in engaged regression analysis so that they can actually develop for us an image of the child X number of years later since the abduction,” Mayorkas said. “We’ve actually recovered children, victims of abduction and exploitation through that age-progression methodology.”