WASHINGTON — Citing a commitment to stringent data protection standards, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has explicitly barred its workforce from wearing Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses on the job. The agency noted that the wearable devices pose an unacceptable privacy risk to the individuals its agents are currently tracking across state lines.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a sweeping internal memo this week prohibiting field personnel from utilizing the $299 wearable tech, which features a discreet built-in camera and multimodal AI capabilities. According to the directive, the agency determined that allowing Mark Zuckerberg’s hardware into holding facilities could severely compromise the civil liberties of the suspects being indefinitely detained there without legal representation.
When a family is awoken by armed federal personnel in the middle of the night, they deserve the peace of mind knowing that their trauma is not being silently logged by a Silicon Valley corporation," said Arthur Pender, ICE Deputy Administrator of Tactical Discretion.
The prohibition places ICE alongside a growing coalition of privacy-conscious workplaces banning the Meta devices, though the federal agency remains unique in its specific concern over proprietary surveillance monopolies. Internal homeland security documents indicate officials were deeply alarmed by the glasses’ ability to automatically index faces, locations, and conversations—capabilities that ICE insists must remain strictly confined to the government’s own unregulated biometric databases.
Frustrated field agents reportedly pushed back against the new dress code during morning briefings, complaining that the ban on hands-free recording hardware will force them to return to manually holding their personal smartphones while filming detainees for their private group chats.