During the election campaign and in recent days, Donald Trump has detailed extensive plans for crackdowns on immigration and mass deportations during his second term as president of the United States. These initiatives, he said, would include aggressive operations in areas known as “sanctuary cities” that have laws that specifically restrict local authorities from collaborating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
With these promises in sight, a new report by researchers from the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), a nonprofit pro-privacy organization, details the ways in which federal/local data-sharing centers known as “fusion centers” already result in cooperation between federal immigration authorities and sanctuary city law enforcement.
Led by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, fusion centers emerged in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks as a counterterrorism initiative to integrate intelligence between federal, state, and law enforcement agencies. local. Fusion centers spent $400 million in 2021, according to public records. And, as STOP researchers point out, in more than two decades the centers have never proven themselves worthy of their stated purpose of addressing terrorism in the United States. For example, anonymous DHS officials told a Senate panel in 2012 that fusion centers produce “predominantly useless information” and “a lot of garbage.”
In addition to aggressive investigative tactics, such as obtaining data from schools and abortion clinics, ICE agents have relied on fusion centers for years to obtain everything from photographs of suspects to license plate location data and more, to often in a process that includes input from law enforcement. in sanctuary cities.
“This is an area where it is very profitable for localities to cooperate with ICE, and because it is not very visible, it often faces less pushback,” says STOP Executive Director Albert Fox Cahn. “This kind of information-sharing capability at this scale across all of these agencies that leverage everything from local utility records and DMV records to school records has the potential to be deployed in any number of chilling scenarios.” “.
ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED.
Fox Cahn adds that regional police officers did not always see the concept of sanctuary cities as an inconvenience that needed to be solved. “Until recently, many law enforcement agencies expressed support for sanctuary city protections, fearing that ICE collaboration would actually harm public safety if immigrants were unwilling to report when they were victims of a crime.” or witnesses to a crime. “, says. “But the police have become much more politically engaged with immigration in recent years.”