As Donald Trump’s administration intensifies its crackdown on undocumented immigrants, there is growing concern that immigration agents will utilize surveillance technology to apprehend individuals targeted for deportation, even in “sanctuary cities” that have restricted local law enforcement cooperation with immigration officials.
This concern is based on the fact that in previous years, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has gained access to significant amounts of data from sanctuary cities that could aid in their enforcement actions. This information includes data from the extensive network of license plate readers active across the United States, as reported by documents obtained by The Guardian.
Local agencies across the country employ license plate readers, high-speed cameras that capture images and videos of every vehicle passing through, to collect information about vehicle movement and store it in databases shared among local and federal law enforcement agencies. Therefore, while federal agents may not be legally allowed to collaborate with certain authorities, they can often still obtain the information gathered by those authorities.
As an example, the Westchester County, New York, has had laws since 2018 that limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. However, documents including emails and access logs revealed that ICE had previously accessed a significant database containing license plate reader information collected across the county.
Neighboring cities in Westchester, which reportedly have over 480 such cameras, claim to be in compliance with local sanctuary laws and deny cooperating with ICE, but these data-sharing practices between the county police and ICE seem to bypass and undermine the sanctuary city laws.
This raises concerns that ICE may use data captured in one area to pursue immigrants in other areas, including other sanctuary cities, thus creating an extensive surveillance network.
“Westchester County can either be a sanctuary county or a surveillance state. It cannot be both. This sort of mass tracking violates the promise made to undocumented residents that they will be safe in the county,” said Albert Fox Cahn, the director of privacy advocacy group Surveillance Tech Oversight Project.
In addition to using local networks, ICE employs the national database of Vigilant Solutions to monitor movements, a Motorola subsidiary that offers license-plate reading technology throughout the United States. Civil liberty and privacy experts argue that these technologies create a massive surveillance network, tracking the movement of every vehicle in the U.S. despite the absence of active investigations.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/11/ice-car-trackers-sanctuary-cities
