During the election campaign and in recent days, Donald Trump has made extensive plans for an immigration crackdown and mass deportations during his second term as President of the United States. He said the measures would include aggressive operations in areas known as “sanctuary cities” that would include local law enforcement cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). There are mitigating laws.
With those commitments looming, a new report by researchers at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), a pro-privacy nonprofit, details ways that federal/local data sharing centers known as “fusion centers.” known as , is already the result of cooperation between federal immigration. Authorities and Sanctuary City law enforcement agencies.
Managed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, the Fusion Centers emerged in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks to coordinate intelligence between federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. As an act of terrorism. Fusion centers spent $400 million in 2021, according to public records. And, as the STOP researchers point out, in more than two decades the centers have never proven their worth for their stated purpose of combating terrorism in the United States. Unnamed DHS officials told a Senate panel in 2012, for example, that fusion centers produce “basically useless information” and “a bunch of garbage.”
In addition to aggressive investigative tactics like pulling 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. in the holy cities.
“This is an area where it’s very profitable for local people to cooperate with ICE, and because it’s less visible, it often faces less pushback,” says STOP Executive Director Albert Fox Kahn. has to.” Agencies have the ability to deploy everything from local utility records and DMV records to school records in cold storage.
ICE did not immediately return WIRED’s request for comment.
Fox-Kahn added that the concept of sanctuary cities wasn’t always viewed as an inconvenience by local police. “Recently, many law enforcement agencies have been very vocal in their support of sanctuary city protection, because they feared that ICE’s cooperation would actually harm public safety if immigrants were victims of crime or a crime. Don’t be prepared to come forward as a witness,” he says. “But the police have become much more politically engaged on immigration in recent years.”
