When a car passes an automated license plate reader (ALPR), its plate is captured and instantly compared against a list of vehicles that police are actively looking for or that police have identified for real-time surveillance. These are called “hotlists,” and EFF has learned that one used by agencies across the country targets immigrants on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Agencies using Flock Safety ALPR systems commonly allow the plates their cameras collect to be compared against the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) hotlists, broken into “topics” such as “Gang or Suspected Terrorist,” “Stolen Vehicle,” and “Missing Person.” But one list is different: the “Immigration Violator” hotlist is populated exclusively by ICE, and includes license plates associated with administrative warrants issued by ICE agents without judicial review.
Buried in the Flock Safety administrative interface is a drop-down menu where agencies select which NCIC topics to subscribe to. If “Immigration Violator” is selected, the local agency receives an alert that a vehicle ICE is looking for has been sighted. In many places, using ALPRs for immigration enforcement is against city or state law—or at minimum, against agency policy. But using this hotlist is immigration enforcement. For example, Sparks Police Department’s own ALPR transparency portal lists immigration enforcement among “prohibited uses,” yet records show Sparks utilizes ICE’s Immigration Violator hotlist.
Many agencies publicly acknowledge using NCIC hotlists but don’t publish which ones. So EFF filed public records requests with agencies around the country to identify which agencies may be using the Immigration Violator hotlist. Of the 13 agencies that have responded so far, two—Blue Island Police Department (IL) and Sparks Police Department (NV)—had the Immigration Violators hotlist enabled, while eleven others confirmed using NCIC hotlists with Immigration Violators disabled.
EFF has published a step-by-step guide for members of the public to investigate their own local agencies: first checking resources like AtlasofSurveillance.org and EyesonFlock.com for background research, then filing a public records request using template language developed by EFF, and finally taking the results to local reporters or city officials who control the agency’s Flock contract.
Knowing whether a local agency has the Immigration Violator box checked isn’t just useful information—it’s the kind of evidence that can change how officials vote when a surveillance contract comes up for renewal. As EFF notes, even getting the box unchecked is not the end of the story: as long as the underlying infrastructure for immigration surveillance stays intact, the system remains one policy, personnel change, or error away from being switched back on.
This article was originally published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Republished under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0. Read the original article: https://eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/are-your-local-police-using-flock-safety-alprs-scan-immigrants.
