Artificial intelligence (AI) is all over the news. Sometimes it’s the butt of jokes, like when it finds black Nazis and lady popes. But no one doubts how swiftly it can search mind-boggling amounts of information. And all nervously wonder whose jobs it will take.

It could also excel at fighting fraud—and vetting visa applicants.

Visa holders are guests in the country they visit, and guests have responsibilities to their hosts that include not insulting them or wrecking their homes. The AP reports that U.S. embassies have been posting warnings to foreign visa applicants that “if you are in this country to promote Hamas, to promote terrorist organizations, to participate in vandalism, to participate in acts of rebellion and riots on campus … you’re out”.

This is nothing new—there were posters in the consular waiting room telling applicants the consequences for fraud when I started as a consular officer in New Delhi 25 years ago. But today the odds of being caught lying are higher, thanks to improved technology and data-scraping tools powered by AI.

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Which brings us to CBP One, a phone app originally built to speed up processing of cargo at official ports of entry. The Biden administration hijacked it as a tool to mass parole inadmissible migrants through these ports, effectively laundering illegal immigration by artificially lowering the numbers of those caught on the border. At the peak, Biden was allowing about 1,500 illegal migrants a day to schedule their illegal entry and be paroled.

President Trump ended this immediately. Then his Department of Homeland Security (DHS) re-designed the app into “CBP Home”, which allows migrants in the U.S. illegally to manage their own deportation and inform DHS. If they do this in a timely fashion, they may not be subject to legal bans from re-entering the U.S. based on their illegal presence here.

If they don’t take this initiative and DHS has to find them, warns Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, they will be deported anyway. Removal from the United States makes a migrant ineligible for visas in future for certain periods, in some cases permanently.

CBP Home can also help all aliens register in accordance with a recent presidential order. Failure to register is also grounds for deportation. By law, the millions of illegal migrants on the “non-detained docket” who have ongoing deportation proceedings should be detained. If we can’t manage that, we should at least know where they are.

CBP Home could be updated to add a tracking feature, so that the illegal migrant could prove they had left the U.S. or to inform facial recognition software in airports and border posts in real time. But that’s only the beginning.

A decade ago, I was in the Department of State’s Visa Office, charged with innovation. I found various systems which could be combined into a booth, located anywhere, to capture an applicant’s passport, photo, fingerprints, and other data. The booth could also have done an automated interview while monitoring physical reactions to estimate the applicant’s veracity.

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The concept was to have as much of the visa application done as possible before the interview. Consular officers do catch a lot of fraud. If they have a gut feeling someone is lying, they can pull on that thread with detailed questions until the applicant cracks or clams up.

But it takes time, and it isn’t foolproof. Having an on-screen estimate of each applicant’s likelihood of overstaying, working illegally, or other visa abuse would be a huge help.

This could be based on AI comparisons of cases with similar age, residence, occupation, previous travel, and purpose of visit. Documents including school reports, work histories, and personal references would provide even more data for the AI to run against and store.

For 70 years since the Immigration and Nationality Act was passed, it’s been possible to break all the rules and not be caught. Now visitors to the U.S. know that we’ll “trust but verify” their promises, and that we’ll know if they fail to depart in time.

There are avenues for them to stay longer for valid reasons or come back later. But with powerful new tools to magnify human efforts, we can stop some guests from treating our laws as optional.