BiasHigh
US DHS’s Opaque Vetting Software Allegedly Relied on Poor-Quality Data and Discriminated against Immigrants
- Occurred
- Aug 26, 2014
- Published
- Aug 26, 2021
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)’s ATLAS software used in vetting immigration requests was condemned by advocacy groups as a threat to naturalized citizens for its secretive algorithmic decision-making, reliance on poor quality data and unknown sources, and alleged discrimination of immigrants using biometric and sensitive information.
Developers
- US Citizenship and Immigration Services
Deployers
- US Department of Homeland Security
- US Citizenship and Immigration Services
Harmed parties
- US naturalized citizens
- US immigrants
- US citizenship applicants
- US immigration applicants
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 85%
Rationale: Software allegedly discriminated against immigrants using poor data and opaque algorithms.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8