State Cops Quietly Tag Thousands as Gang Members — and Feed Their Names to ICE

Police gang databases are known to be faulty The secret registries allow state and local cops to feed civilians personal information into massive barely regulated lists based on speculative criteria like their personal contacts clothing and tattoos even if they haven t committed a crime The databases aren t subject to judicial review and they don t require police to notify the people they peg as gang members They re an ideal tool for functionaries seeking to imply criminality without due process And a large number of are directly accessible to Immigration and Customs Enforcement An scrutiny by The Intercept located that at least eight states and large municipalities funnel their gang database entries to ICE which can then use the information to target people for arrest deportation or rendition to so-called third countries A few of the country s largest and majority of immigrant-dense states like Texas New York Illinois and Virginia direction the information to ICE through varied paths that include a decades-old police clearinghouse and a grid of post- intelligence-sharing hubs Both federal immigration leadership and local police intelligence units operate largely in secret and the full extent of the gang database-sharing between them is unknown What is known however is that the lists are riddled with mistakes Available research reporting and audits have revealed that several contain widespread errors and encourage racial profiling The flawed systems could help ICE expand its dragnet as it seeks to carry out President Donald Trump s promised mass deportation campaign The administration has cited common tattoos and other spurious evidence to create its own lists of supposed gang members invoking the Alien Enemies Act to send hundreds to El Salvador s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center prison also known as CECOT Gang databases The Intercept identified as getting shared with ICE contain hundreds of thousands of other entries including chosen targeted at Central American communities that have landed in the administration s crosshairs That information can torpedo asylum and other immigration applications and render those seeking legal status deportable They re going after the asylum system on every front they can commented Andrew Matter supervising counsel for criminal justice issues at the nonprofit LatinoJustice Using gang affiliation as a feasible weapon in that fight is very scary Information supplied by local gang databases has already driven at least one scenario that became a national flashpoint To justify sending Kilmar Abrego Garcia to CECOT in March federal leaders used a disputed summary that a disgraced Maryland cop submitted to a defunct registry to label him as a member of a transnational gang The statement cited the word of an unnamed informant Abrego s hoodie and a Chicago Bulls cap items indicative of the Hispanic gang civilization it noted Related The Evidence Linking Kilmar Abrego Garcia to MS- A Chicago Bulls Hat and a Hoodie The development echoed patterns from Trump s first term when ICE leaned on similar information from local cops evidence as flimsy as doodles in a attendee s notebook to label immigrants as gang members eligible for deportation As Trump s second administration shifts its immigration crackdown into overdrive ICE is signaling with cases like Abrego s that it s eager to continue fueling it with local police intelligence Nayna Gupta strategy director at the American Immigration Council argued that this kind of information-sharing boosts ICE s ability to target people without due process This opens the door to an incredible amount of abuse she disclosed This is our worst fear In February ICE arrested Francisco Garcia Casique a barber from Venezuela living in Texas The agency alleged that he was a member of Tren de Aragua the Venezuelan gang at the center of the latest anti-immigrant panic and sent him to CECOT Law enforcement intelligence on Garcia Casique was full of errors A gang database entry contained the wrong mugshot and appears to have confused him with a man whom Dallas police interviewed about a Mexican gang USA This day released Garcia Casique s family insists he was never in a gang It s unclear exactly what role the faulty gang database entry played in Garcia Casique s rendition which federal executives insist wasn t a mistake But ICE agents had direct access to it plus tens of thousands of other entries from the same database The Intercept has uncovered Under a Texas statute Trump ally Gov Greg Abbott signed into law in any county with a population over or municipality over must maintain or contribute to a local or regional gang database More than Texas counties and dozens more cities and towns meet that bar State functionaries compile the disparate gang intelligence in a central registry known as TxGANG which contained more than alleged gang members as of Texas then uploads the entries to the Gang File in an FBI-run clearinghouse known as the National Crime Information Center state bureaucrats substantiated to The Intercept Created in the s the NCIC is one of the most of commonly used law enforcement datasets in the country with local state and federal police querying its dozens of files millions of times a day The FBI did not answer The Intercept s questions This opens the door to an incredible amount of abuse ICE can access the NCIC including the Gang File in several avenues largest part directly through its Investigative Incident Management system Department of Homeland Defense documents show The Obama administration hired Palantir the data-mining company co-founded by billionaire former Trump adviser Peter Thiel to build the proprietary portal which makes countless records and databases instantly available to ICE agents Palantir is currently expanding the tool having signed a million contract during the Biden administration to upgrade it TxGANG isn t the only gang database ICE can access through its Palantir-built system The Intercept trawled the open web for law enforcement directives police training materials and state and local statutes that mention adding gang database entries to the NCIC Those The Intercept identified likely represent a small subset of the jurisdictions that upload to the ICE-accessible clearinghouse New York Focus first published the NCIC pipeline-to-immigration agents when it uncovered a -year-old gang database operated by the New York State Police Any law enforcement entity in the Empire State can submit names to the statewide gang database which state troopers then consider for submission to the NCIC The New York state gang database contains more than entries and has never been audited Related CBP Agents Can Have Gang Tattoos as Long as They Cover Them Up The Wisconsin Department of Justice which did not respond to requests for comment has instructed its intelligence bureau on how to add names to the NCIC Gang File as in recent days as The Intercept exposed Virginia has enshrined its gang database-sharing in commonwealth law which explicitly requires NCIC uploading In April Virginia agents helped ICE arrest people who law enforcement administrators claimed were part of transnational gangs The Illinois State Police too have shared their gang database to the FBI-run dataset They also share it directly with the Department of Homeland Guard ICE s umbrella agency through an in-house information-sharing system a local PBS affiliate uncovered last month The Illinois State Police s gang database contained over entries as of The data-sharing with Homeland Assurance flew under the radar for years and likely violates Illinois s sanctuary state law Even in the jurisdictions that are not inclined to work with federal immigration executives the information they re collecting could end up in these federal databases commented Gupta Aside from the National Crime Information Center there are other conduits for local police to enable the Trump administration s gang crusade A few departments have proactively shared their gang information directly with ICE As with the situation of the Illinois State Police s gang database federal agents had access to the Chicago Police Department s gang registry through a special data-sharing system From to immigration leadership searched the database at least times a city audit later identified In one instance the city admitted it mistakenly added a man to the database after ICE used it to arrest him The Chicago gang database was full of other errors like entries whose listed dates of birth made them over years old The inaccuracies and immigration-related revelations among other issues prompted the city to shut down the database in Other departments allow partner agencies to share their gang databases with immigration personnel In The Intercept shared that the Los Angeles Police Department used the statewide CalGang database itself shown to contain widespread errors to help ICE deport undocumented people The following year California enacted laws that prohibited using CalGang for immigration enforcement Yet the California Department of Justice explained The Intercept that it still allows the Los Angeles County Sheriff s Office to share the database which contained nearly entries as of last year with the Department of Homeland Safeguard Each user must document their need to know right to know prior to logging into CalGang and that documentation is subject to regular audit a California Department of Justice spokesperson explained Read Our Complete Coverage The War on Immigrants Local police also share gang information with the feds through a series of regional hubs known as fusion centers Created during the post- domestic surveillance boom fusion centers were meant to facilitate intelligence-sharing particularly about purported terrorism between federal state and local law enforcement agencies Their scope expeditiously expanded and they ve played a key role in the increase of both immigration- and gang-related policing and surveillance The Boston Police Department notified The Intercept that agencies within the Department of Homeland Safeguard seek access to its gang database by filing a request for information through the fusion center known as the Boston Regional Intelligence Center In ICE detained a teenager after receiving records from the Boston gang database which used a document about a tussle at his high school to label him as a gang member Boston later passed a law barring law enforcement functionaries from sharing personal information with immigration enforcement agents but it contains loopholes for criminal investigations In the two decades since their creation fusion center staff have proactively sought to increase the upward flow of local gang intelligence including by leveraging federal funds as in the episode between the Washington D C Metropolitan Police Department and the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center which works directly with the Department of Homeland Safeguard An email from uncovered as part of a trove of hacked documents shows that an employee at the Maryland fusion center threatened to withhold certain federal funding if the D C police didn t regularly share its gang database I craved to prepare you that sic your agency s decision to NOT connect may indeed effect sic next years sic funding for your contractual analysts a fusion center official wrote So keep that in mind Four years later ICE detained a high schooler after receiving a D C police gang database entry The entry mentioned that he self-admitted to being in a gang an Intercept examination later announced a charge his lawyer denied For jurisdictions that don t automatically comply the Trump administration is pushing to entice them into cooperating with ICE The budget bill Trump signed into law on the Fourth of July earmarks chosen billion for state and local ICE collaboration as well as billions more for local police Official police partnerships with ICE had already skyrocketed this year more are sure to follow Revelations about gang database-sharing show how decades of expanding police surveillance and speculative gang policing have teed up the Trump administration s crackdowns commented Gupta of the American Immigration Council The core obstacle is one that extends far beyond the Trump administration she stated You let the due process bar drop that far for so long it makes it very easy for Trump The post State Cops Quietly Tag Thousands as Gang Members and Feed Their Names to ICE appeared first on The Intercept