Experts Say ICE Likely Still Able to Access LBPD License Plate Data; Local Elected Officials Remain Silent on Issue

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Councilmembers Suzie Price, Roberto Uranga, and Rex Richardson, along with three other councilmembers who have since left office, successfully voted to pass the Long Beach Values Act in 2018. The resolution built on state law prohibiting cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration agencies in most situations.

It was hailed as a way to curb future deportations of Long Beach residents in a city where about a quarter of the population are immigrants. 

Every councilmember who has been elected since then—Mary Zendejas, Cindy Allen, and Suely Saro—has vowed to defend immigrant rights while in office.

In fact, Zendejas, Price, Saro, and Uranga are themselves either first- or second-generation immigrants. As is Long Beach’s first ever Latino police chief, Robert Luna, who recently shared his immigrant roots before the council, saying, “Part of my story is, as well, my father got here illegally. He was undocumented, became documented.”

Mayor Robert Garcia is an immigrant too—something he often brings up in media appearances and when campaigning for political office. He championed the Long Beach Values Act and assured the immigrant community that their information would not be shared with federal immigration authorities. In recent years, he made a habit of lambasting the Trump administration’s immigration policies on social media.

By all appearances, Long Beach is an immigrant-friendly place where city officials have committed themselves to upholding the state and local Values Act.

And yet, when we reported late last year that the Long Beach Police Department had been sharing data from its automatic license plate readers (ALPR) with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), betraying the city’s sanctuary status, none of Long Beach’s elected officials spoke out or publicly pushed for accountability and transparency around the ALPR program.

We sent questions to all nine councilmembers and the mayor about their silence on the issue and asked how the public could be sure the city was fully complying with the Values Act, but we received no responses.

‘BIG TIME TRUST BROKEN’

In contrast, when it was discovered this past December that police in Chula Vista were sharing license plate data with ICE, the city’s mayor spoke up forcefully, calling for a “comprehensive review of the program” and announced plans to hold a public hearing on the matter.

Alameda’s City Council turned down a purchase of ALPRs from Vigilant Solutions—the same vendor the LBPD contracts with—after learning the company had a data-sharing agreement with ICE. “It’s a problem how they share this information,” the city’s vice mayor said, who had some choice words for Vigilant, which is owned by Motorola: “In my mind, they made us look like hypocrites,” he said. “That should be flagged for every other city that’s doing business with them.”

Protests in the City of San Pablo, near San Francisco, pressured lawmakers there to require Vigilant to stipulate in its license plate reader contract that it would pay liquidated damages if data collected within city boundaries was shared with ICE.

The City of Richmond went even further, ending its relationship with Vigilant over its ties to ICE and passing an ordinance prohibiting the city from doing business with vendors that supply data to ICE. Oakland also passed a similar law.

So far, the only public mention of the matter in Long Beach since the data sharing was revealed over three months ago has come from Chief Luna.

At a City Council study session on racial equity and police in late January, Luna publicly acknowledged for the first and only time that ICE was given access to the department’s database of license plate records.

“I know there was a young lady earlier talking about the ICE incident, which we regret,” Luna said.

The “young lady” Luna referred to was Jamilet Ochoa, an organizer for the Long Beach Immigrant Rights Coalition who had phoned into the meeting during public comment to demand accountability. She says Luna’s words were underwhelming and the lack of action on the matter by local lawmakers has been disappointing for the city’s immigrant community.

“I think it shows of how little importance it is to them. I don’t think the priority here is to regain the trust of the community,” she said. “There is this talk about reconciliation. How can we start talking about reconciliation when trust was just broken? Big time trust broken.”

The Long Beach Values Act required all department heads, including Luna, sign a pledge to adhere to the resolution. It was also incorporated into LBPD policy.

“This is something that needs to be brought up in the open with a plan of action to fix it and not just regret,” said Ochoa.

‘THEY’RE TRACKING EVERYTHING’ 

The data that was shared with ICE was collected by special cameras made by Vigilant Solutions. These automatic license plate readers, which are often found mounted on police vehicles and traffic signal poles, are capable of indiscriminately capturing license plate numbers at a rate of up to 1,800 per minute. 

Because the camera also logs time, date, and location information, the data can be used to reconstruct historical travel patterns of a vehicle with extreme precision going back years. The software can even predict a vehicle’s location at a particular time.

“If they’re trying to find you, they can actually ask the software to predict where you’re going to be at any given time of day,” said Dave Maas, investigations director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, during a panel discussion on ALPRs put on by the Pasadena Privacy for All Coalition earlier this month

This ability to map out a person’s life with such hyper-detail has made surveillance technology and data harvesting a central tool for identifying deportation targets. Records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union show that over 9,000 ICE officers nationwide have access to Vigilant’s database.

“They’re literally tracking everything. They’re tracking everything from your address, your relationships to people, your biometrics. There’s more and more technology to be able to track location data, whether that’s coming from license plate readers or cell phone data,” said Jacinta Gonzalez, an immigrant rights activist with Mijente, a Latinx advocacy group.

The ACLU also uncovered ICE’s Vigilant Solutions audit reports, which shed some light on how the agency uses the ALPR database. The documents show that in 2018, it was accessed by ICE on average over 30,000 times per month—with thousands of those searches labeled by ICE as related to administrative deportation investigations. It shows ICE officers using the database to track the movements of deportation targets and their families.

The LBPD said ICE was given access to its database of license plate records via Vigilant’s portal beginning in February 2020.

This means the data was being shared when a Long Beach father was taken into custody by ICE last March while crossing the street from his home to his car. He spent over three months at the ICE-run Adelanto Detention Center before being bailed out.

“This causes emotional and economic stress, right, it’s a ripple effect that happens for an entire community, not just the person that’s been detained,” Ochoa said.
It’s estimated that Long Beach is home to about 31,000 undocumented immigrants, according to a 2018 report from the New American Economy.

The city also has the largest population of Cambodian refugees outside of Cambodia, a community that has been increasingly targeted by ICE in recent years. In fact, members of the Cambodian community were organizing to create deportation defense strategies during the period LBPD was sharing license plate data with ICE.

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When we asked the police department about the data sharing in November, we were told that no data had been given to ICE, which turned out to be false, and that an administrative review would be launched into why ICE appeared on the list of agencies that had access to the database. 

The following month, the LA Times reported that the LBPD had completed their review and found that an employee (later reported to have been a “contract employee”) had inadvertently allowed ICE to access the data by toggling a “group approval” feature.

“It should be noted that personal identifying information associated with read plates was never shared,” LBPD spokesman Brandon Fahey told the Times.

However, Maas says that characterizing ALPR data as not being “personal identifying information” is misleading and is a talking point pulled directly from Vigilant’s marketing material.

“If I see that your car is parked at your place of work and parked at your house every night, then I know it’s you. Like, these things are important to us. Our travel patterns are unique to us,” said Maas.

What’s more, immigrant activists and privacy researchers agree that ICE has the ability to connect a license plate number with a person using records from the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

“Every law enforcement agent, including ICE, has access to DMV records,” said Brian Hofer, executive director of Secure Justice, an Oakland-based nonprofit that has been advocating for regulations on the use of surveillance technology at the local level.

Evidence has emerged showing that ICE can access DMV records via the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS), a confidential computer network connecting public safety agencies statewide to criminal histories, driver records, and other databases.

According to a report from the American Civil Liberties of Northern California and the National Immigration Law Center, immigration authorities are not required to to explain the purpose of inquiries made in the system.

And this is not the only avenue available for ICE to identify someone based on a license plate number.

It’s been previously reported that the DMV makes $50 million a year selling access to its data— including vehicle registration lists—to commercial data brokers, such as Palantir and LexisNexis. 

These data brokers, in turn, sell this information to ICE, giving the agency the ability to connect a license plate number to the address and name on a vehicle’s registration.

“That’s super, super easy for them, if they have somebody’s license plate, to figure out who it is. It’s probably run through the Thomson Reuters CLEAR database,” said Aaron Lackowski, a researcher with Empower LLC, which collaborated with Mijente to publish a report on the technology industry’s increasing role in ICE’s surveillance apparatus.

He notes that Thomson Reuters—which has $50 million in contracts with ICE—didn’t show up on a list of about 60,000 data purchasers from the DMV obtained by Mijente earlier this year, but that is likely because the company typically buys the data through intermediaries. 

“I had a long back-and-forth with the California DMV on this, and ultimately ran into a dead end when they couldn’t provide information on ‘subrecipients’ of DMV data, as many states do,” Lackowski said.

These giant data clearinghouses aggregate information from public records, social media sites, online tracking, surveillance technology companies, and even retail loyalty card programs, and have become a “mission critical” tool for ICE, according to a 2016 contract between the agency and Thomson Reuters.

Another legal protection that these commercial data brokers help law enforcement agencies circumvent is the period of time the data can be stored. For example, while LBPD policy requires that license plate reader data be erased from city servers after two years, the data also flows into Vigilant’s LEARN database, which then feeds into the Thomson Reuters’ CLEAR database, where it can theoretically be stored forever.

“Working in advocating for immigrant rights for so many years, all of the push has been around pushing back against law enforcement entanglement with the Department of Homeland Security,” said Layla Razavi, deputy executive director for Freedom for Immigrants, a nonprofit dedicated to ending immigration detention. “And now we’re suddenly having to adapt and learn more about what technology companies are doing and how they’re collaborating with DHS.”

ICE FINDS A WAY

In December, the LBPD said it revoked ICE’s direct access to the ALPR database.

“Since discovering this error, the Department has implemented several protocols to ensure this error does not occur again in the future, including prohibiting group approvals and adding additional steps in the review and approval process,” LBPD’s Fahey said.

While privacy advocates believe that’s a good first step, they say that ICE is likely still able to get its hands on the data due to the vast law enforcement information-sharing networks through which the data flows.

“Just blocking off ICE directly, it only sort of slows them down,” said Hofer. “Shutting off data to ICE doesn’t mean ICE isn’t getting it. ICE just needs to find one willing partner in that chain.”

A Jan. 4 printout from the LBPD’s Vigilant system shows that while ICE has been removed from the list of entities that have access to the database, the San Diego Sector Border Patrol and the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) National Targeting Center continue to have access—both of which have a documented history of sharing data with ICE—continue to have access to it. The printout was obtained via a public records request by Greg Buhl, an attorney who runs CheckLBPD.org, a local police transparency website.

“The California Values Act is really clear that its restrictions extend to all immigration authorities,” said Razavi, who was on the legal team that helped draft SB 54, otherwise known as the California Values Act. “CBP is definitely part of that. So if Long Beach has removed ICE, and CBP is still named, then I would say it’s definitely not compliant [with the Values Act].”  

Under SB 54, local law enforcement agencies are still allowed to share information around crimes that have been committed and any public safety threats, but Hofer said that carve-out often gives law enforcement a lot of latitude to share data with immigration authorities.

“There’s so many of these multi-jurisdictional task forces and Fusion Centers now that our legislative strategy is insufficient by itself. We’re basically playing whack-a-mole. There’s so many commingled databases, and so much sharing that we have to change the entire culture to really have a meaningful impact,” said Hofer, who is also chair of Oakland’s Privacy Commission.

Among the hundreds of different entities from across the nation listed on the January data-sharing report generated by LBPD’s Vigilant system were Fusion Centers in Indiana and northeast Florida. Fusion Centers were created in the wake of 9/11 and serve as information pass-through hubs between federal, state, and local law enforcement. The primary federal partner in this venture is DHS, parent agency of ICE and CBP.

According to the ACLU, Fusion Centers are shrouded in secrecy and have unclear rules about which agency is ultimately responsible for the activities undertaken at these facilities.

Also granted access to LBPD’s license plate date are various police and sheriff’s departments in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Texas that participate in ICE’s so-called 287(g) program. This program essentially allows local law enforcement officers to undergo ICE training and assist with federal immigration enforcement.

“When you look at some of these printouts, and there’s hundreds of entities, I can’t believe that none of those were fishing expeditions, that they all had a real legitimate investigatory need to look at Long Beach’s data,” said Hofer. “It just doesn’t pass the smell test. They’re very likely running searches for other entities, and those entities might not have the same values as [Long Beach].”

Airports, law enforcement task forces, and small town police departments from all over the country are granted access to LBPD’s ALPR data without discrete agreements to govern how the data should be used, as the California Department of Justice has recommended. One entry simply reads “West Baton Rouge,” a parish in Louisiana, without specifying an agency. Another entry mystifyingly lists Lexington County Health Services in South Carolina.

The number of entities on the data-sharing list has fluctuated without explanation over the years, according to police records. In January 2020, 1,031 were listed in the printout but that was pared down to 625 in August before increasing slightly to 634 this January.

Privacy researchers say Vigilant’s business model is based on compelling law enforcement agencies to be secretive with the public about their surveillance systems, going as far as requiring purchasers to sign non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements.  

The technology is marketed as a tool to find stolen vehicles, bust illegal drug rings, and capture sex traffickers, and Vigilant encourages indiscriminate data-sharing among the hundreds of agencies on the company’s LEARN network. Selling access to this giant pool of data is where the big profits lie for the company.

“We find that this results in a system where policing is profit motivated, where there’s a financial relationship between the company selling the technology and the police,” said Maas.

ACCOUNTABILITY?

So what consequences can the police department and the city face for having shared data with ICE? Well, the answer is not as straightforward as one would think.

Razavi said the California State Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s Office is responsible for enforcing SB 54.

“The State Attorney General can and should be investigating these instances,” she said.

When asked in late January if a probe had been launched, a spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office said, “To protect its integrity, we’re unable to comment on a potential or ongoing investigation.”

Beyond that, if the city continues to share data with immigration authorities, such as CBP, Razavi says civil rights and public interest lawyers could sue the city to put an end to it.

Last year, a Salvadoran undocumented immigrant who was taken into custody by ICE sued Daly City in federal court, alleging that its police department violated SB 54 by sharing personal information with immigration officials, among other things. The case is ongoing and is believed to be the first claim for alleged violations of SB 54 to make it to court. 

Apart from monetary damages, the lawsuit asks for Daly City’s policy on immigration enforcement to be strengthened. Immigration advocates in the Bay Area have said that the case will be a test to see how well the legal protections afforded by the Values Act hold up.

Razavi said that ICE operations are so secretive that it can be difficult to ascertain what exactly went into a person being marked as a target for deportation, meaning it will likely remain unknown whether the license plate data shared by the LBPD assisted in any removals.

“One of the things that’s so alarming and specifically one of the reasons I think we’ve always held that it’s really harmful to have law enforcement agencies tied up in the ICE deportation dragnet is that once you’re muddled up in this system, your hands are always going to be dirty,” said Razavi.

TRANSPARENCY AND BEYOND 

Largely missing from the police’s purchase and use of surveillance technology, including ALPR systems, is public input.

“The public is being left out of these discussions; where a decision about license plate readers is being made in sales meetings, not in public hearings,” said Maas.

When the Long Beach City Council approved a nearly $400,000 purchase of ALPRs for the city’s Parking Enforcement Division in November, the item was placed on the consent calendar, and was voted on without any discussion.

“A staff report on the purchase, if it even has to go to the council, certainly doesn’t say ‘Hey, Vigilant is using our data to deport people with ICE.’ And so it gets blindly approved,” said Hofer.

Ochoa, with the Long Beach Immigrant Rights Coalition, said that even though unfettered use of surveillance technology most acutely affects vulnerable populations, such as undocumented immigrants, the movements of anyone with a vehicle are being captured by these cameras.

“I don’t think a lot of people are aware of that, and that is very concerning to me,” she said. “But the thing that is very disappointing is the fact that the city’s not bringing awareness to this.”

Hofer notes that many times the purchase of surveillance technology by police doesn’t meet the purchase price threshold to come before a city council and says cities should implement requirements that all such purchases are brought before the public, no matter the price.

He helped push for a series of sweeping surveillance ordinances that passed in Oakland in 2018, which did just that.

“Technology keeps getting cheaper, the data-sharing keeps getting cheaper. And so we knew with those spending authority limits that they would be able to escape oversight. So we’ve forced everything out into the open. Even if it’s a grant, even if it’s a gift from another jurisdiction, or a police foundation, everything has to come out in the open and vetted and approved by the governing body and the public gets a bite at the apple,” Hofer said.

San Diego is also considering a similar law.

“It’s kind of becoming the norm,” said Hofer.

Oakland’s law, like the one in Richmond, also prohibits the city from entering into contracts with businesses that work with ICE.

None of this has come without some pushback from police and law enforcement groups. For example, St. Louis spent four years debating whether to pass an ordinance governing how police surveilled residents. However, it fizzled after the city’s police expressed concerns about the law.

And it’s a factor that could help explain local lawmakers’ silence on the issue so far. The Long Beach Police Officers Association holds an incredible amount of influence over the city’s political life through massive amounts of political donations.

“I think it requires a level of vigilance,” said Razavi. “I think it requires some political backbone to be willing to stand up against your own local law enforcement agents in a city council meeting or a county board of supervisors meeting and demand answers.”