Good morning. Welcome to another episode of our monthly series, Hard Truths, examining systemic racism in the U.S.

Today, how flawed technology is making its way into the U.S. immigration system.

Facial recognition has become a pretty common part of our lives, whether it's when you pick up your phone to unlock it or when Facebook knows how to tag you in a photo.

Most of us know what it's like to have our faces scanned to prove our identity.

But this technology can be rife with racial bias, particularly against black people.

Even in simple uses of that technology, you know,

being able to determine whether a person's face is facing a phone or a camera or

whether a person's hand is under a sink to get the sink to run water,

we've seen problems there.

That's Chaz Arnett, a law professor at the University of Maryland,

who's dedicated his career to studying how digital technologies are expanding the reach of the criminal justice system and hurting black and Latino people.

He's especially interested in how this faulty tech can have some very serious consequences.

Just in the past year, we've had the first two cases where a person was charged on and arrested on the basis of facial recognition evidence.

And it, you know, later was revealed that that evidence was inaccurate.

You had a man in Michigan and another black man out of New Jersey, both who were charged with crimes that they

were not guilty of. Because of these errors, Boston and San Francisco recently became the

first two cities to ban police departments and local agencies from using facial recognition

technology. But even as some cities start to move away from this

technology, it's starting to show up in the federal U.S. immigration system.

I see great overlaps between the way in which facial recognition technology is being used

in criminal legal processes and in the immigration system context and which, you know,

from the United States government mantra,

...