A Tennessee grandmother was babysitting four kids when U.S. Marshals arrested her at gunpoint, and she says it all traced back to one AI match

A 50-year-old Tennessee grandmother is suing a North Dakota city and its police department, alleging that a flawed artificial intelligence facial recognition match led to her being wrongfully detained for nearly six months. Angela Lipps, of Elizabethton, Tennessee, was arrested at gunpoint by U.S. Marshals in July 2025 while babysitting four young children for her neighbor.

As detailed by Fox News, the complaint filed on September 15, 2026, alleges that the Fargo Police Department relied exclusively on an uncorroborated match from Clearview AI to secure an arrest warrant and extradite Lipps to North Dakota. Lipps says she had no connection to the bank theft case or to the state.

In a GoFundMe post, Lipps said she spent 108 days in a Tennessee county jail. She wrote, “They said I was fugitive from justice. I had no bail,” adding, “No one interviewed me. I just sat and waited.”

West Fargo police saw the same match and passed on it

The underlying case involved a series of bank thefts in Fargo and West Fargo during April and May 2025. According to the lawsuit, an unknown woman used stolen identities and fake identification cards to commit fraud.

Instead of using surveillance footage, police allegedly ran a photo from a fraudulent ID card through Clearview AI. The company states its platform is meant to provide leads, but the complaint alleges Fargo police presented the match as a positive identification without disclosing that it had never been independently verified.

The West Fargo Police Department reportedly reviewed the same match and declined to seek charges because it was uncorroborated. One West Fargo police captain reportedly described facial recognition as “close to a last-ditch effort,” according to the lawsuit.

The complaint accuses Detective Lucas Heck of failing to review Lipps’ travel or financial records, which it says showed she was in Tennessee during the thefts. It also claims Heck ignored physical differences between Lipps and the suspect, including a neck tattoo Lipps has that the suspect in the footage did not. It is not clear whether Heck has responded to the allegations.

After her arrest on July 14, 2025, Lipps was extradited and reportedly held on a $100,000 bond while facing eight felony charges, the most severe carrying up to 10 years in prison. Prosecutors dismissed all charges on December 24, 2025.

According to the complaint, Lipps discovered upon her release that she had lost her residence, her car, and her personal property. The Fargo Police Department and the city of Fargo acknowledged investigative errors at a press conference in March 2026, with Mayor Tim Mahoney saying that once the errors were found, “we immediately addressed it.”

Clare Garvie, deputy director of Technology Law and Policy with the Policing Project, said there are at least 16 known instances of someone being wrongfully arrested because of a facial recognition match. She explained that these errors often happen when officers fail to take additional steps to verify the result. In a separate case in England, a man was wrongly flagged by facial recognition during a burglary investigation.

Nate Freed-Wessler, a deputy director at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the use of these technologies is fueling wrongful arrests across the country. He added that in some cases, police intentionally avoid making notes about their use of AI.