On the campaign trail and in recent days, Donald Trump has expanded comprehensive plans For his immigration crackdown and mass deportations during his second term as President of the United States. He has said that these initiatives will include aggressive operations in areas known as “sanctuary cities”, which specifically have laws reducing local law enforcement cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
With these promises, a new report Researchers at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), a pro-privacy nonprofit, have detailed the ways in which federal/local data-sharing centers, known as “fusion centers”, have already resulted in federal There is cooperation between immigration authorities and sanctuary-city law enforcement.
Run by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, fusion centers emerged as a counterterrorism initiative to integrate intelligence between federal, state, and local law enforcement after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Fusion centers spent $400 million in 2021, according to public records. And, as STOP researchers point out, over two decades the centers have never proven their usefulness for their stated purpose of addressing terrorism in the US. unknown DHS officials told a Senate panel in 2012For example, fusion centers produce “mainly useless information” and “a bunch of nonsense”.
In addition to aggressive testing strategies such as Pulling data from schools and abortion clinicsICE agents have relied on fusion centers for years to obtain everything from photographs of suspects license plate location data And more—often in a pipeline that includes input from law enforcement working in sanctuary cities.
Albert Fox Kahn, executive director of STOP, says, “This is an area where it is extremely beneficial for local people to cooperate with ICE, and because it is not highly visible it often faces less of a response. ” Agencies are tapping into everything from local utility records and DMV records to school records, which can be deployed in any catastrophic scenario.
ICE did not immediately respond to WIRED's request for comment.
Fox Kahn says the concept of sanctuary cities was not always seen as an inconvenience to work by regional police. “Until recently many law enforcement agencies were very vocal in supporting sanctuary city protections, because they feared that if immigrants were unwilling to come forward if they were victims of a crime or witnessed a crime, ICE cooperation would actually harm public safety,” he says. “But in recent years the police have become more politically engaged on immigration.”