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Facial recognition is really bad at recognizing faces. As The Denver Post recently reported: A test done by a grassroots campaign to ban facial recognition technology in Denver found it falsely matched Denver City Council members to people in the sex offender registry. The people behind an initiative to ban facial recognition surveillance in Denver, said they believe the technology isnt ready for law enforcement.

A big concern that our group has is the proliferation of false positive responses that this technology puts out there, said committee member Connors Swatling. Swatling ran a test with Amazons Rekognition software. He compared the photos of Denver City Council members to about 2,000 photos from the Denver County Sex Offender Registry. It took him three days to run the data.

The results we got back were pretty astounding, Swatling said. In some cases, as many as four false positives from a pool of 2,000 images, which is a very small pool.

Merlin facial recognition. Image courtesy The New York Times

Swatling said Council member Chris Hinds photo falsely matched with four different registered sex offenders. Their crimes ranged from sexual assault of a child to criminal attempt sexual assault on a child. His test found nine council members had photos that matched with someone in the sex offender registry. In some cases, the software was 92% confident the photos were a match.

There are ways this technology can do a lot of good, but its not ready to be implemented by Denver municipal agencies just yet, Swatling said.

What is even more troubling is that someone has claimed that he and his company have solved these problems. And theyve done it by scraping pictures of people off of social and digital media sites. Scraping is using machine learning programs to go and search for data using a set of parameters and once the data is found it is grabbed and returned to the person who initiated the search.

Scraping imagery from social and digital media sites is also a violation of almost every social and digital media platforms and companies terms of service. What could make this even worse? The guy who now has more than three billion peoples digital pictures just handed them over to law enforcement. Not because warrants were issued, not because a subpoena was issued, but because he can make money from doing it.

From The New York Times:

Until recently, a fellow named Hoan Ton-Thats greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trumps distinctive yellow hair on their own photos.

Then Ton-That an Australian techie and onetime model did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously. He provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security.

His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.

Federal and state law enforcement officers say that while they have only limited knowledge of how Clearview works and who is behind it, they have used its app to help solve shoplifting, identity theft, credit card fraud, murder and child sexual exploitation cases.

Until now, technology that readily identifies everyone based on his or her face has been taboo because of its radical erosion of privacy. Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so. In 2011, Googles chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used in a very bad way.

Facial recognition technology is not always accurate at correctly identifying faces. Image by Rapid API.

Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology. But without public scrutiny, according to the company, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year. It declined to provide a list. The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.

What could possibly go wrong?

Begin with the fact that Ton-That advertised his services as being available for use to influence elections. Add that he sold this technology to white supremacist, anti-Semite Paul Nehlen, who attempted to run for Speaker Paul Ryans seat in Wisconsin, until the Wisconsin state Republican Party rightly kicked him out of the party for his egregious views. Then add that he has cozied up to alt-right, Holocaust denier Chuck Johnson, who was banned from Twitter and with whom the Capitol Police had to intervene because he was stalking Speaker Boehner.

From Buzzfeed: Originally known as Smartcheckr, Clearview was the result of an unlikely partnership between Ton-That, a small-time hacker turned serial app developer, and Richard Schwartz, a former adviser to thenNew York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Ton-That told The Times that they met at a 2016 event at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, after which they decided to build a facial recognition company.

The following February, Smartcheckr LLC was registered in New York, with Ton-That telling The Times that he developed the image-scraping tools while Schwartz covered the operating costs. By August that year, they registered Clearview AI in Delaware, according to incorporation documents.While theres little left online about Smartcheckr, BuzzFeed News obtained and confirmed a document, first reported by the Times, in which the company claimed it could provide voter ad micro-targeting and extreme opposition research to Paul Nehlen, a white nationalist who was running on an extremist platform to fill the Wisconsin congressional seat of the departing speaker of the House, Paul Ryan.

A Smartcheckr contractor, Douglass Mackey, pitched the services to Nehlen. Mackey later became known for running the racist and highly influential Trump-boosting Twitter account Ricky Vaughn. Described by the Huffington Post as Trumps most influential white nationalist troll, Mackey built a following of tens of thousands of users with a mix of far-right propaganda, racist tropes, and anti-Semitic cartoons. MITs Media Lab ranked Vaughn, who used multiple accounts to dodge several bans, as one of the top 150 influencers of the 2016 presidential election ahead of NBC News and the Drudge Report.

Right now the only thing standing between significant numbers of U.S. Federal, state, and local law enforcement officers (perhaps under the guise in facial recognition use to identify potential suspects) gaining access to pictures of your face, without any legal justification for getting the pictures is whether or not Mr. Ton-Thats scraping algorithms have collected every picture of you thats ever been posted on line. Current federal and state law and regulations, as well as local ordinances, do not really address this. There is almost no existing protection for any of us, from whatever Mr. Ton-That decides he wants to use our pictures for in pursuit of his personal profit.

The only real deterrent, which does not seem to be doing any actual deterring, is the potential that Facebook or Twitter or YouTube (Google) or Vimeo, etc. might sue Mr. Ton-That for violating their terms of service. Right now Mr. Ton-That, based on pictures of you posted on the Internet, knows if youve been sleeping, he knows if youre awake, he knows if youve been bad or good, so Well you get the idea and it isnt a pleasant one!

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Thinking Security: Facial Recognition - Really Bad at Recognizing Faces, With Odd Links to Bad Guys - by Jan Wondra - The Ark Valley Voice

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LONDON Ricky, Ricky, Ricky (Gervais), what have you done? You crazy, mixed-up comedy kid (aged 58). I love your work, dude. The Office, Extras, and After Life are innovative comedy gold in the Larry David class, but your edgy Golden Globe monologue roasting Hollywood pieties has been reverse-engineered into a monster on social media.

So if you do win, dont use it as a platform to make a political speech to lecture the public If you do win come up accept your little award. Thank your agent, thank your God and f**k off, you told the glitzy audience and it was sweet music to the angry Trump/Brexit echo chamber. Last week, it was even weaponized to take aim at the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, well, Captain Jean-Luc Picard to be precise, in the shape of the actor Sir Patrick Stewart.

Sir Patrick, a high-profile campaigner to stop the UK leaving the European Union, told a reporter Brexit was the grimmest thing to have happened to him in his political life. Cue the social media pile-on and the brandishing of the Gervais monologue as the go-to cudgel to beat him into silence.

Twenty-four hours later and the same cohort produced what is known in British newspaper slang as a reverse ferret: A sudden reversal in an editorial or political line on a certain issue (a ferret being a domesticated polecat trained to drive rats from their burrow). This time an actor spouting off about politics was hailed as an anti-woke hero, by the same voices who had roared their approval when Gervais told the Hollywood liberal establishment to button-it.

Laurence Fox, a scion of the Fox acting clan (his uncle, Edward, played the upper-class English assassin in the 1973 classic political thriller The Day of the Jackal), blew up Question Time, the flagship BBC debate show in which guests from the worlds of politics and the media answer questions posed by members of the public. Inevitably, it was the national fixation Meghan Markle and Prince Harrys decision to consciously uncouple from the British royal family aka the worlds greatest soap opera that triggered the (lights, camera) Action!

Fox accused Rachel Boyle, a university academic, of being racist after she called him a white privileged male for denying the Duchess of Sussex was hounded from Britain for being mixed-race.

Fox groaned and banged his head on the table theatrically, claiming Britain is the most tolerant, lovely country in Europe. He added: Oh my God. I cant help what I am, I was born like this, its an immutable characteristic: to call me a white privileged male is to be racist youre being racist.

To press home his point, the white victim of racism later tweeted a Martin Luther King quote suggesting he and the great civil rights leader were on the same page. Thats what George Soros might call chutzpah.

Little known for hiw work, the actor is now the UK poster boy for the angry white man on social media, and revelling in his newfound alt-right fame. After being targeted with a wave of online outrage, the actor goad-tweeted: To be clear, I am in no way having the best day of my life ever drinking all these leftist tears. My cup it overfloweth. But please dont stop. With the chances of more acting roles open to question, he is on the brink of a new career as yet another agent provocateur of clicks.

But Gervais was mistaken to demand actors, artists, and singers to stay on script and not ad-lib about causes they believe in. Ever since the dawn of mass entertainment, performers have leveraged their fame to promote important causes they believed in Paul Robeson for example. Is Gervais saying Bob Dylan, Paul Newman, and 1960s A-listers who went to the South to support the desegregation struggle should have stayed home? Should the Live Aid artists have ignored the plight of starving Ethiopians and stuck to sex, drugs, and rock n roll?

Meanwhile, those who denounce the lily-livered liberal artists would do well to remember that Ronald Reagan was a chip off the Hollywood block. Indeed, President Donald Trump began his journey to the White House when his fame really kicked in as an entertainer, via The Apprentice reality series.

As Shakespeare said: All the worlds a stage, And all the men and women merely players, in what now appears to be a prophecy of the digital age and its hyper-reality.

Or as Ricky Gervais himself put it, at the conclusion of the Golden Globes ceremony: Thats it, were done. Thank you. Have a good night. Please donate to Australia

Keep it civilized, keep it relevant, keep it clear, keep it short. Please do not post links or promotional material. We reserve the right to edit and to delete comments where necessary.

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Acting Up: Meghan Markle, Ricky Gervais, and the Other 'Fox News' - WhoWhatWhy

If theres one thingfurries have (aside from their own distinct fursonas), its morals. Last year, the Midwest Furry Furrie Fandom said no to the fur-right when they banned alt-right controversialist and all-round douchebag Milo Yiannopoulos from attending FurFest in Chicago.

Now, in a trippy turn of events, a group of furries attending a convention in California rescued a woman from an alleged assault, pinning down the suspect in full furry attire until the police arrived.

The alleged assault took place last week outside the FurCon convention in San Jose, California, where a number of furries intervened upon spotting the incident. One attendee, who was having a smoke outside when the victims car pulled up in front of them, caught the incident on camera. In the footage, taken outside the Marriott Hotel, the group stepping in can be seen wearing shades of furry pink,reportedly dressed as adinosaur, tiger and cowboy, with FurCon lanyards. The furry heroes prise open the car door, where the assailant and victim were in the front seats, and pull the man from the vehicle.

We heard a womans screams coming from inside and saw the passenger throwing full fists at whoever was driving. We got up and ran towards the car, my friend pulled open the door and we both held onto the attacker, Robbie Ryans, 26, told NBC.

Even though were wearing animal costumes, weve got some humanity as well, fellow convention attendee who went by the name Khord Kitty added. Its just a natural thing to want to help someone in need.

Four or five furries followed suit by jumping on the suspect, Demetri Hardnett, 22, who was then arrested at the scene on suspicion domestic violence charges, as police reports show.The release from authorities mentions the act of bravery from bystanders (although their furry attire is not). Not all superheroes wear capes, clearly.

See the original post here:
God bless the furries who stopped a domestic violence incident - Dazed

WASHINGTON - On Dec. 18, immigration reform stalwart Richard J. Durbin's announcement on the Senate floor about a rare bipartisan breakthrough flew largely under the radar, overshadowed in the chaotic flurry of impeachment.

Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah had dueled two months earlier over unanimous consent requests on the Senate floor, and had since been deadlocked.

Each had pushed for his own solution to an important but often overlooked symptom of the broken U.S. immigration system: the employment-based green card backlog. Because of it, hundreds of thousands of people - overwhelmingly from India - wait in limbo, sometimes for decades.

A version of Lee's legislation - the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act - had quietly passed the House earlier in the year with bipartisan support.

When Lee tried to bring the legislation to the Senate floor for an immediate vote, Sens. Charles E. Grassley and Rand Paul objected.

Then, in October, Durbin objected.

Durbin had introduced his own legislation that he felt tackled the problem more holistically. But when he later sought unanimous consent for his measure, it was Lee's turn to block it.

Paul also had a legislative fix on the table.

Then came the December compromise between Lee and Durbin, who had become the two opposing poles of the backlog issue.

"We've come up with a proposal that moves us in the right direction," Durbin said of his agreement with Lee. "These families affected by this backlog are really going through hardship and concerns that no family should face. The sooner we resolve them, the better."

Outside Congress, in online forums, debate over how to fix the problem grew tense and, at times, heated. Immigrant advocacy groups, lawyers and policy experts specifically zeroed in on the logjam of employment-based green cards - and often found themselves in the unusual position of opposing each other.

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the compromise from Lee and Durbin remains in a holding pattern while the two lawmakers determine whether they have succeeded at clearing the path of further objections.

Every year, the United States distributes about 1 million green cards based on various categories - to immediate relatives of citizens, refugees and asylum-seekers, and to foreign workers on temporary visas. Since 1965, there's been a limit to how many spots can be given to applicants from any one country.

Family reunification has always been the main priority of the U.S. immigration system, so the bulk of green cards go to people sponsored by family members already in the country. A small share of total green cards - around 140,000 - are reserved for the employment category, per a 1990 immigration law. No one country can be allotted more than 7% of the total work visas, which feed into the employment-based green card pipeline (although visas left over in one category can roll over to another). Despite changes in the economy and labor market, this upper limit of 7% has remained the same since 1990.

The problem is that the number of green card petitions approved tends to far exceed that 7% limit. So petitioners from a country over that threshold are put on a wait list. Upwards of 500,000 people who applied for key employment-based categories of green cards in 2018 are in the current backlog, according to an estimate by the libertarian Cato Institute.

But that backlog isn't distributed equally.

Work visas like the H1-B are intended for temporary workers in science and technology fields. But these visas have become a key steppingstone to citizenship for immigrants with the resources to study at American colleges or who've been recruited by U.S. employers in science and technology-related fields.

Indians have increasingly come to the United States since the 1960s, but they arrived at an accelerated pace following the tech boom that started in the mid-1990s. They now make up the bulk of green card applicants in the employment-based category, followed by Chinese. Because they quickly come up against the 7% annual limit, most Indians will probably wait 10 or more years to obtain their green cards, according to Cato. The ones who applied in 2018-19, however, may face a line up to 50 years long.

Many of these individuals develop deep ties to America while waiting. They bring over spouses and buy homes and cars. They enroll children in school. And yet, true stability is precariously at arm's length.

Their American lives run on three-year extensions of their work visas, because even if their green card petitions are approved, it may be decades before the actual green cards are granted. The wait has immense costs - lawyers' and application fees, but also lost wages, promotions and other opportunities, in addition to the vulnerability to wage exploitation. More intangibly, it comes with grave uncertainty about the future.

If a visa holder in the green card backlog dies during the wait, the person's spouse and family lose their place in line - and can find themselves without legal status. That's what happened to Sunayana Dumala, the wife of Srinivas Kuchibhotla, a young engineer killed in a 2017 hate crime. In a recent Kansas City Star op-ed advocating for Lee's legislation, Dumala explained what it felt like to be stuck.

"We cannot travel back to our home countries for funerals, let alone weddings or to support our parents' medical needs, because we fear being stuck abroad and uprooting our lives," she wrote. "Children born overseas who accompanied their parents to the U.S. are 'aging out' of green card applications and may need to leave the country. Self-deportation is the only alternative to living this life of constant fear. But is that really a choice?"

While many on both sides of the aisle agree about the severity of this group's predicament, they diverge on the solutions.

Lee's original bill sought to phase out country quotas for employment-based greencards, creating a first-come, first-served system. It also proposed raising country quotas for family-based green card categories from 7 to 15 percent. But, because many Republicans generally oppose increased immigration, the bill would not increase the total green cards given annually.

"At first glance, you say, 'Oh this is awesome - it gets rid of per-country limits,' " immigration lawyer Charles Kuck recently recalled on his podcast. "But because of the way it gets rid of per country limits, it has a serious effect on people already going through the immigration process, and it comes at a particularly inopportune time."

Any proposal to bring more immigrants to the country is a nonstarter for hard-line immigration restrictionists. But disagreement about the impact of Lee's bill has split even immigration proponents into two camps. Advocates of the bill believe it rectifies a past wrong, giving Indians their rightful place in line, while critics emphasize that it does so by shifting the burden of the backlog onto other countries and visa categories, instead of eliminating it.

Ira Kurzban, a prominent immigration lawyer and professor at University of Miami, pointed out that the country caps were instituted in 1965 to have a more equitable immigration system. The immigration law passed that year also removed bars on immigrants from Africa, the Middle East and Asia. While the caps had an unintended effect in creating the backlog, they actually opened up immigration to Indians in the first place, Kurzban argued.

In an analysis he circulated, Kurzban demonstrated that while India disproportionately bears the burden of the backlog, its nationals actually get more than their 7% share every year because of an oft overlooked loophole: While each country is allotted 7 percent, unused shares from low-demand countries like Iceland can be given out to high-demand countries, including India.

Kurzban further estimated that Lee's original bill would actually increase the total backlog for employment-based residency to 1.1 million by 2029 - and increase wait times to 17 years, for everyone.

"Do the math," he wrote in an August blog post.

He and other critics also worry that in a first-come, first-served system, since backlogged Indians would get all the green cards over the next few years, they would edge out applicants from other countries. When Paul objected last summer, he asked for a carve-out for health care workers - nurses from, for example, the Philippines - who would be one of the groups facing long waits due to Lee's original bill. Other critics brought up the potential disadvantage his bill could further cause for Middle Eastern scientists affected by the travel ban and longtime immigrants from, say, Latin America at risk of losing temporary protections that let them stay and work in the United States.

"The answer is not to fight over the few visas given each year; the answer is to have a larger number of visas to the benefit of the U.S. economy," Kurzban wrote in his blog post. "Simply, we need more visas."

Other experts aren't so sure about the forecasts of deleterious effects and believe that Lee's bill is the best chance in the current political reality to address the problem. David Bier, Cato's immigration policy analyst, estimates about 50% of the applicants in 2018 were Indian but received only 13% of the total green cards issued. He calculated that Lee's legislation, if implemented, would resolve the backlog in eight years - during which time only Indians would get green cards for around four years.

"Opponents of the legislation claim that this is unfair, yet new Indian applicants who applied in 2018-19 will not receive any greencards under the bill for almost eight years, and if the law isn't passed, then they would face a half a century wait (ultimately, nearly half would give up before then)," he wrote in a blog post.

Aman Kapoor is the co-founder of Immigration Voice, a group of Indians lobbying for a solution to the green card backlog. He has lived in the United States for 17 years. He and his family received approval for their residency application in 2007, but they still don't have green cards.

Even before Durbin formally put a hold on Lee's legislation in mid-October, Kapoor and his group launched a media blitzkrieg accusing the Illinois senator of discriminating against Indians by not allowing Lee's bill to be taken up. They argued any amendments he intended to tack on would amount to a "poison pill" that would alienate Republicans and ultimately kill the bill.

"Senator Durbin's argument against the bill is no different from the arguments presented by those against removing segregation and discrimination," the group wrote in an email statement at the time.

Durbin's bill would lift country caps and, among other changes, add enough additional green cards to almost entirely cover the backlog in the employment-based and family-based categories. After analyzing the measure, Cato's Bier concluded it "probably contains the best legal immigration reforms overall since the comprehensive immigration reform bill that passed the Senate in June 2013."

But Durbin's bill reinforced a backlash from Indians on the green card waiting list and their lobbyists. To them, the legislation was not politically viable because it would raise the level of immigration overall - a prospect that many Republicans in the Senate will not even entertain.

The rhetoric got so bad that immigration attorney Leon Fresco, a former senior Senate staffer who considers himself the architect of the Lee legislation, stepped away from his role as adviser to Immigration Voice.

"I can't be part of it because I need to maintain professionalism. I would never advise anyone to be as personal as they're being right now," he says. "However, I get why people are frustrated."

But Durbin's bill did have its supporters, and they, too, spoke up.

Lakshmi Sridaran, interim executive director of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), a progressive advocacy group, wrote an op-ed in an Indian American publication asking South Asians to oppose Lee's bill and support Durbin's. In her view, Lee's version was akin to giving immigrant groups scraps to fight over - a bigger piece of the pie, instead of a bigger pie. She also said Lee's bill, and the rhetoric around it, set up hierarchies among the immigrant community of who is more or less deserving of citizenship.

"It's not just the backlog issue but that this is one part of a very broken immigration system," she says. "I don't think the groups advocating for this bill are interested in an inclusive organizing strategy, but a political strategy to win."

She and other opponents of Lee's bill fear if what they believe to be an imperfect bill passes, pressure to pursue longer-term, systemic changes in the immigration system would fizzle out. In Congress, where the track record for passing immigration legislation is quite poor, there may not be a chance to return and fix things.

A handful of immigrant groups, including the advocacy network, United We Dream, support SAALT's position.

In December's compromise with Lee, Durbin tacked on amendments to the bill that would do three main things: help applicants and their families in the United States switch jobs and travel without losing status; carve out a quota for applicants from abroad; and put a check on big Indian IT firms that have been found to abuse the H1-B applications process.

"So, this bill offers some concessions to both sides of the issue - to the groups advocating for the rights of people stuck in green card backlogs, and those advocating for the rights of new immigrants to come to the U.S. from abroad," Julia Gelatt, policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, explained via email.

But many remain dissatisfied. SAALT's Sridaran lamented the compromise legislation fails to raise the total number of green cards. And Immigration Voice asked its supporters to call Durbin's office, to warn that if the compromise bill does not pass, "Durbin, and Durbin alone, will be solely responsible for ethnic cleansing of Indian American immigrants from the US."

Lee's office said the lawmaker was working to build consensus, but there will likely not be any movement on this bill at least until impeachment proceedings have concluded.

"Whether or not this bill will go anywhere: It's usually safest to predict that Congress doesn't have the will to tackle something as contentious as immigration reform. That seems particularly true as the Senate grapples with impeachment and considers a response to the emerging conflict with Iran," Gelatt said.

"Of course, surprises can happen."

(c)2020 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Green card gridlock: When will Congress agree on a solution? - PostBulletin.com

The five Republicans running for the chance to unseat Democratic U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin all call for stronger efforts to thwart illegal immigration -- but they disagree about whether a wall across the Mexican border is the best solution.

During a joint endorsement interview Friday at the Daily Herald offices in Arlington Heights, three of the GOP hopefuls enthusiastically supported President Donald Trump's plan to build that border wall, sections of which have been erected. Two said they prefer other options, such as airborne drones.

The candidates in the March 17 primary are: retired information technology professional Casey Chlebek of Glenview; former Lake County Sheriff Mark Curran of Libertyville; former police officer Peggy Hubbard of Belleville; Dr. Robert Marshall, a physician from Burr Ridge; and Dr. Tom Tarter, a urological oncologist from Springfield.

The winner will face Durbin, a four-tern incumbent from Springfield, in November.

Tarter said walls have reduced illegal immigration where they've been built along the border. He wants the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection to get enough funding to complete 450 miles of wall.

"Walls work," he said. "This is why Democrats don't want them -- at least the open-border Democrats."

Tarter said the government should implement technology that will help detect the attempted importation of illegal drugs and track migrants.

Additionally, Tarter said immigration applications should use a merit-based system that awards points for work history, education, speaking English, community service and "evidence of assimilation."

Marshall said he's "100% in favor" of completing the border wall. He called for tighter immigration policies and said he opposes comprehensive immigration reform, calling it "a code word for amnesty."

Marshall said immigrants should have to meet three criteria to live in the U.S.: they should be able to support themselves; they should be able to speak English "to a minimal degree" or be willing to learn; and they "should love us and not want to blow us up."

Hubbard said she supports Trump's efforts to secure U.S. borders. Like Tarter, she said walls work -- but she also advocated using technology and putting "more boots on the ground" at the border.

Hubbard lauded the president for sending military troops to the border in 2018 as a caravan of migrants from Central America approached the U.S.

Hubbard supported shifting to a merit-based immigration system, too.

Curran was an outspoken advocate of immigration reform during the last eight years of his 12-year tenure as sheriff, which concluded in 2018.

In 2011, Curran said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement should "quit wasting time breaking up families, because it makes America a lesser country." The following year, he backed a proposal that would allow people living here illegally to get driver's licenses so they could get to work.

On Friday, Curran said a wall across the southern border makes a statement about American sovereignty -- "but it's going to be very expensive."

Curran said drones and other high-tech security equipment could more effectively stop border incursions.

"We've seen all the videos of people going underneath the walls, and creating these tunnels," he said.

Curran also voiced concerns about radical Islamists getting into the U.S. "The wall alone is not going to keep America safe," he said.

Chlebek wants a different approach to protecting U.S. borders, too. Walls can be breached, he said, and the project is too costly.

Technology should make a border wall "irrelevant," Chlebek said.

"People are ready for it and expect it," he said.

If high-tech programs aren't implemented, however, Chlebek said he'd support completing the wall.

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Republican senate candidates disagree about whether a border wall is the solution to illegal immigration - Chicago Daily Herald