What specific cases document ICE access to Flock Safety data and how were accesses authorized?
Executive summary
Multiple investigative reports and public records document instances where U.S. immigration authorities accessed license-plate data that flowed through Flock Safety systems not by a direct Flock–ICE contract but by using local and state law‑enforcement accounts or informal requests; those accesses appear to have been authorized either by explicit agency-to-agency sharing settings, by local officers running searches on behalf of federal agents, or by permissive vendor configuration settings that made “front door,” “back door,” and “side door” access possible [1] [2] [3].
1. The Danville FOIA audit: thousands of ‘ICE’ searches logged
A Freedom of Information Act review of Danville, Illinois, audit logs revealed more than 4,000 lookups from June 2024 to May 2025 that listed reasons such as “immigration,” “ICE+ERO,” or “ICE WARRANT,” indicating ICE used local agencies to query Flock’s national lookup network rather than accessing Flock directly—this reporting underpins the clearest documented pattern of immigration‑related searches across jurisdictions [1].
2. University of Washington report: front, back and side doors
University of Washington Center for Human Rights researchers described three pathways through which federal immigration agencies obtained ALPR data: direct 1:1 sharing by local agencies with Border Patrol (the “front door”), cross‑jurisdictional access via Flock’s nationwide network (the “back door”), and local officers conducting searches on behalf of federal agents (the “side door”); UWCHR public records showed at least some Washington agencies enabled direct sharing with federal immigration units and uncovered examples of side‑door searches where local officers ran queries for ICE [2].
3. Local audit traces and specific Washington examples
Public‑records reviews and local audits in Washington and elsewhere documented instances where audit logs contained “ICE,” “ERO,” or “immigration” as the stated reason for searches, and investigators found emails and listserv requests from HSI or Border Patrol asking local agencies to run searches—one documented case in Washington involved a local agency performing a search on behalf of ICE, illustrating authorization occurred through informal interagency requests rather than through Flock granting federal user accounts [2] [4].
4. Cross‑city searches: Oakland, San Francisco and state highway patrol logs
Reporting based on audit logs from Oakland’s network showed hundreds of thousands of searches by outside departments and noted a California Highway Patrol entry logged simply as an “ICE case,” while investigations found the San Francisco Police Department and other agencies had searched or shared Alameda/Oakland ALPR data with federal partners—these examples demonstrate how local law‑enforcement searches or onward sharing can function as the mechanism that puts Flock data within reach of ICE‑related investigations [5].
5. How authorization happened in practice: local control, shared credentials, or informal favors
Across reporting, the ways ICE accessed Flock data were characterized as: local agencies enabling 1:1 sharing with federal partners (explicit configuration), local officers running searches for federal agents after requests via email/listserv or in person (side‑door searches), and instances where permissive vendor or municipal settings inadvertently allowed broader access; audit logs, listserv emails, and entries in system “reason” fields (e.g., “ICE”) serve as the documentary basis for these claims [3] [2] [1].
6. Company stance, municipal variations, and contested narratives
Flock Safety insists it has no contract with ICE and that customer agencies control sharing settings and can revoke access at will, framing these as protections of local autonomy [6] [7]; municipalities and police chiefs have sometimes countered investigators’ findings—some cities maintain federal agencies had no access to their systems, while audits and news outlets report otherwise—this produces a factual dispute where vendor policy and real‑world configuration or personnel behavior diverge [8] [6].
7. Limits of available reporting and outstanding questions
The public reporting establishes documented searches and mechanisms by which ICE‑related queries were run through Flock systems, but open questions remain about the full extent of federal investigators’ accounts, how often searches were initiated by formal warrants versus informal requests, and whether individual incidents involved mistaken tagging or deliberately mischaracterized “reasons”—those details are not comprehensively resolved in the available sources [1] [2].