Two Chinese nationals are facing federal charges after arriving at John Wayne Airport with U.S. passports issued to other people, according to prosecutors. Jin Fu Wei, 44, of Guangxi province, and Xiaodan Lei, 47, of Henan province, arrived from Mexico on August 26 and made initial court appearances Tuesday in Los Angeles federal court, the Department of Justice said.
The New York Post reported that Customs and Border Protection officers flagged a facial-recognition mismatch between the men and the biometric information associated with the passports. The mismatch is an allegation in the case, not a finding of guilt. Prosecutors have charged both men with misuse of a passport; they are presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
A screening tool used nationwide
The reported airport screening is part of a broader federal effort to compare travelers’ live images with government photo records. CBP describes its Simplified Arrival process as using facial comparison at ports of entry. The agency has reported that close to 100 million travelers had participated in its facial-comparison process and that it had prevented more than 900 impostors from entering the country since September 2018. Those are nationwide agency figures, not John Wayne Airport statistics, and they do not establish how common passport misuse is.
CBP has documented earlier use of the technology in a separate case: on August 22, 2018, officers at Washington Dulles International Airport identified a facial mismatch after a man arriving from Sao Paulo presented a French passport. The agency described that detection as its first impostor interception using the new technology. The Dulles incident illustrates an earlier use of facial comparison, but it is not evidence of a connection to the John Wayne case or of a trend in passport misuse.
A separate international document-checking measure
Facial comparison is distinct from checks against databases of lost or stolen travel documents. INTERPOL says officials worldwide searched its Stolen and Lost Travel Documents database 3.6 billion times in 2023, producing 232,423 positive matches, or “hits.” Those global totals describe database checks—not facial-recognition screenings—and do not measure the prevalence of U.S. passport misuse or explain how the passports in this case were obtained.
The Justice Department says the FBI is investigating the origin of the passports and who may have supplied them. The available information does not resolve those questions, and the charges against Wei and Lei remain allegations.
