jphripjah

A few months back my wife (LPR) and 2 year old son and I (US citizens) landed at LAS and went through passport control together and I think there was a facial recognition rejection/mismatch for my son. Maybe that's because his face looks different at 2 years old then it did at 4 months old when we applied for his passport.

The officer at the booth asked where he was born and a few other questions I don't remember and then referred us to secondary inspection room where we waited 15 minutes until someone called my son's name and said "you guys are good to go."

This week we landed again at LAS and the facial recognition system cleared him. It rejected me. The booth officer told me that I'd have to go to secondary. I asked (politely) "Can't you just verify that I'm a US citizen from my passport photo" and she said no, the computer system governs and if there's a mismatch it has to be cleared up in secondary.

Went to secondary, got called up right away, the guy looked at my very thick 9 year old passport (3 sets of extra pages ) and said the mismatch was probably due to the "extensions" to my passport.


He asked me to wait a bit and then called me back up and asked if I had my my driver's license. I told him I did and i was also carrying a passport card. He said he wanted the driver's license. He looked at it and asked me address and checked his computer. He asked the last 4 digits of my SSN. I told him.

He called someone and said "I've got a US citizen here with a facial recognition mismatch but he';s clear I checked his driver's license and checked him in the system" and then told me I could go. He confirmed that the mismatch was due to the adding of pages, something like the system didn't have good photo of my passport, the photo was somehow compromised by the "extensions."

This didn't make a lot of sense to me, since (a) no photos were submitted when I added pages, and (b) I added the pages 7-8 years ago and the system recognized me 3 months ago when it rejected my two year old son. Maybe they mean that because of the added pages my passport can't be read in the scanner easily, I don't know.

Are a lot of people, particularly US citizens, having this issue and being sent to secondary inspection because the system doesn't recognize them?

Is the system just comparing your current face to your passport photo or does it compare it to other photos of you, like on prior entries to the USA?

I'm surprised the primary inspection officer can't just clear this up themselves. I have no problem with the facial recognition system giving the primary officer a "heads up" to investigate a possible impostor, but I'm surprised they have no discretion to do this and it's an automatic referral to secondary inspection.

GUWonder

@jphripjah ,

How many page supplement sections did you have inserted into the US passport of relevance?

My US passport with multiple supplemental page inserts -- for which I got my last section inserted in my ordinary personal passport at a US embassy shortly before the service was being scrapped -- worked just fine with the GE kiosks, with MPC and with simplified (biometric) arrival at various airports of entry during the early part of this year and last year. The last time this US passport of mine had any kind of scanning problem that slowed me down by more than a minute was with UK passport control at LHR at a time when they couldn't boot me even if they wanted to do so but tried to act as if their claimed inability to read the passport RFID is what caused them to slow me down that evening. While there seems to be some correlation between some scanning problems and these extra-large passports, on its face this claim about FRT mismatch with passport being tied back to number of pages seems bizarre to me.

Do you wear glasses? And is your photo on your DL taken with a different look of sort than on your passport used on these trips mentioned in your OP?

There are US passport-carrying natural-born US citizens who have neither driving licenses nor Social Security Administration numbers. What would they have done if you were one of those Americans with an FRT mismatch!?!?

Several years ago, there was this time when CBP wouldn't just take my US passport and clear me to proceed to baggage claim. Instead the Asian CBP guy tried to first talk to me or a travel party member in an Asian language -- a language which wasn't native to him either -- and then asked me for my SSN and for what my listed place of residence at the time was famous. The dude had no clue about the famous people I named as being from the place, including at least one person that the CBP guy should have a clue about given his own past history. The CBP guy was friendly but I didn't appreciate the approach, light-hearted as he tried to be. I never got around to trying to figure out exactly why I got that line of questioning but it was suggested to me that perhaps someone had thought or wanted to think that my passport or that of a travel party member had previously been misused by someone else for entry to the US. There has never been such misuse of any passport of mine, but the line of questioning seemed to be oriented toward someone just wanting to confirm on some entry that my passports were just being used by me.

As a matter of habit for going on decades now, I try to make sure that most or all of my government ID photos are done with me wearing the same top attire and with the exact same look on my face.

Section 107

Your passport book having extension pages (whether one or several extensions) did not "interfere" with the FR process. And the "mismatch" does not necessarily mean that the face you presented at the inspection did not match your face as recorded in the FR database for that passport number. Rather, there is something in your records that triggered the requirement for additional inspection. When the system indicates to the initial officer that additional inspection is required the initial officer is not authorized to "use discretion" and ignore the referral. Perhaps during the time you were waiting to be called for secondary the system "caught up" with any missing/unresolved data or the secondary officer was trained/experienced enough to resolve/clear the issue. It is possible that your passport having so many extension pages and so much activity and therefore an increased possibility of misuse (such as that mentioned by GUW) was the trigger - but that is different than the additional pages actually interfering with the FR part of the process.

jphripjah

I understand that CBP can and will lie to travelers about the reason for a referral to secondary. They might say it's "random" or a "computer issue" or "maybe confusion with someone with the same name" when that's not actually the case, it's a targeted referral based on suspicion. I get that.

I've been in secondary inspection more than a dozen times, many times a targeted referral based on suspicion, i know what that's like.

I genuinely believe this was due to the Face ID thing. the booth officer asked me to stand for the photo and then said it wasn't working and asked me to stand there again and told me it didn't match. When I got back to secondary, they just asked for my identifying info (address, DL last 4 of SSN) and then I stood there as the guy called his supervisor and said he had a US citizen with a mismatch who had given his driver's license and been verified in the system.

I have no reason to believe they were lying. Now, the officer may have been wrong about the extra pages being the issue, as that makes little sense, but I believe this referral was due to Face ID mismatch.

3 sets of 24 pages each added.

No glasses, but my passport photo is now 9 years old. I did have a 5 day beard when I returned 2 days ago and there's no beard in passport photo.

GUWonder

I have traveled with passports with 3 supplemental inserts to enter the US a whole bunch of times in recent years, and I've not had it give me a single problem with GE, MPC, APC, and S(B)A at any point in the last 2-3 years. If having so many pages in the US passports was a routine cause for FRT mismatches at US airports of entry, I would have been hit by it now -- and yet I haven't been hit by such problem.

When I've had to deal with the kind of questioning you mentioned in this thread, it's definitely not been related to passport page inserts inhibiting FRT applicability. It's then been driven by a concern about identity or identification misuse.

Section 107

Having more detail about the inspection certainly helps make it easy to accept the officers were stating the truth about the mismatch in this case actually being a mismatch between your face presented at the POE face and the face programmed into the database. FRT works by making measurements between specific points on the face - those generally do not change much for adults in the years between most passport photos (barring physical injuries). So I suspect the hardware/software in use at the POE was more (or less) accurate than the measurements of the file in the database. Alternatively, there could have been changes in the software used to to process the stored datafile that gets compared to the image taken at the POE. There are other lesser probable alternatives - such as work on the database resulted in the stored datafile incorrectly associated to someone else - but lets hope not. In any event, its not because of the added pages.