During his campaign and in recent days, Donald Trump has detailed sweeping plans for immigration crackdowns and mass deportations during his second term as President of the United States. Those initiatives, he said, would include aggressive operations in areas known as “sanctuary cities,” which have laws specifically limiting local law enforcement’s cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
With these promises being made, a new report by researchers at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), a privacy nonprofit organization, details the ways in which federal/local data sharing centers known as ” fusion’ already lead to cooperation between federal immigration authorities and sanctuary city law enforcement.
Run by the US Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, the fusion centers emerged after the September 11, 2001, attacks. as a counterterrorism initiative to integrate intelligence between federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. The 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 their worth for their stated purpose of dealing with terrorism in the US. Unnamed DHS officials told a Senate panel in 2012. for example, that fusion centers produce “mostly useless information” and “a bunch of crap.”
In addition to aggressive investigative tactics, such as extracting data from schools and abortion clinics, ICE agents have relied on fusion centers for years to obtain everything from suspect photos to license plate location data and more. often in a process that includes input from law enforcement in sanctuary cities.
“This is an area where it’s very profitable for local governments to cooperate with ICE, and because it’s not very visible, it often meets with less pushback,” says STOP Executive Director Albert Fox Kahn. “This kind of information-sharing capacity at this scale across all these agencies that touch everything from local utility records and DMV records to school records has the potential to be deployed in many chilling scenarios.”
ICE did not immediately return a request from WIRED for comment.
Fox Kahn adds that the concept of sanctuary cities has not always been seen by regional cops as a nuisance to work with. “Until recently, many law enforcement agencies have been very vocal in supporting sanctuary city protections because they feared that cooperating with ICE would actually harm public safety if immigrants were unwilling to come forward when they were victims of or witnesses to a crime,” , he says. “But the police have become much more politically engaged with immigration in recent years.”
