You can't refuse to be scanned by ICE's facial recognition app, DHS document say

This is going to be a huge pain. The US has a very fragmented identity system, and "move fast and break things" approaches like this to bring information from across government systems well outside the scope of what that information was collected for will result in real problems.

I worry what this app and systems like it might mean for me. I'm a US citizen, but I used to be an LPR. I never naturalized - I got my citizenship automatically by operation of law (INA 320, the child citizenship act). At some point I stopped being noodlesUK (LPR) and magically became noodlesUK (US Citizen), but not through the normal process. Presumably this means that there are entries in USCIS's systems that are orphaned, that likely indicate that I am an LPR who has abandoned their status, or at least been very bad about renewing their green card.

I fear that people in similar situations to my own might have a camera put in their face, some old database record that has no chance of being updated will be returned, and the obvious evidence in front of an officer's eyes, such as a US passport will be ignored. There are probably millions of people in similar situations to me, and millions more with even more complex statuses.

I know people who have multiple citizenships with multiple names, similar to this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45531721. Will these hastily deployed systems be able to cope with the complex realities of real people?

EDIT: LPR is lawful permanent resident, i.e., green card holder

Can someone remind me why this fragmented identity system is preferable to a National ID?

I get that nobody wants to be tracked by the government. But we are already being tracked... just imperfectly to the point where innocent people are being jailed.

The question should be how accurate do we want the government's data on us to be. And how much of our taxpayer money do we want to spend on companies like Palantir to fuzzy match our data across systems when we could simplify this all with a primary key.

I don't think it is better, I think the US should implement one unified national ID system.