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License plate data collected in these Southern California cities is shared with ICE

by in News

Several Southern California police departments regularly feed information into a massive database used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help with deportations, potentially violating state law, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

In the report released earlier this month, the ACLU of Northern California identified the police departments of Bell, Downey, La Habra and Upland, along with the U.S. Forest Service in California, as some of the more than 80 agencies in more than a dozen states that contribute automated license plate reader data to a database run by Northern California-based Vigilant Solutions.

A subsidiary of Motorola, Vigilant provides all of its data to ICE under a 2018 contract. According to Vigilant, customers must agree to share their data with other customers, including ICE. The agency’s $6.1 million contract gives ICE access to the database – which contains more than 6 billion records of vehicle locations – through September 2020.

In response to the ACLU report, the La Habra Police Department issued a press release that said it shares license plate information with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations arm, which does not work on immigration-related arrests and deportations.

The ACLU report is based on 1,800-plus pages of records released following a 2018 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that sought records of ICE’s accessing private companies’ automated license plate reader databases.

Mounted on vehicles or on fixed structures, automated license plate reader cameras quickly scan license plates. They are increasingly popular with law enforcement departments across the nation. According to Vigilant’s website, “fixed and mobile license plate recognition cameras take photos of license plates capturing date, time and GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken – just like any smartphone camera.” The vehicle locations recorded include vehicles driven by motorists not accused of any crime. Law enforcement officers do not need a warrant to access Vigilant data, unlike GPS tracking devices, which require a warrant from a judge to use.

As of 2018, California is a sanctuary state. That means local and state law enforcement authorities may not use their resources to investigate or arrest people for federal immigration enforcement purposes. In addition, sharing this sort of data may violate a 2016 California law that requires anyone in the state, including public agencies, that use automated license plate readers or access their data, to post a privacy and usage policy online.

On Friday, March 15, a Downey representative said the city has no comment on the ACLU report, but noted that the matter is currently under review by the city attorney’s office. Upland City Manager Jeannette Vagnozzi also had no comment on March 15.

The city of Bell did not respond to requests for comment, nor did the Forest Service.

Among the documents released Wednesday are email exchanges between a La Habra detective and an ICE agent. The ICE agent asks the La Habra detective, whose name is redacted in the emails released by ICE, to run license plates through databases the California officer has access to:

“I am glad you have access, but I am also glad you still need me once in a while,” the La Habra detective writes in a Feb. 15, 2018, email to the ICE agent.

La Habra police declined to comment beyond the press release, which stated that the department collects and shares license plate data through the Orange County Intelligence Assessment Center, a collaboration between local, state and federal law enforcement agencies.

The branch of ICE that has access to the data handles counterintelligence and crimes related to gangs and trafficking of humans and drugs, according to the release. Because the data is not used for immigration enforcement, sharing it does not violate California’s sanctuary law, La Habra police contend in the news release.

According to the ACLU report, 1.5 billion location reports in the Vigilant database come from government agencies. An additional 5 billion location reports come from private businesses, including insurance companies and parking lots.

The Irvine Company shares its the license plate reader data from its Orange County shopping centers with Vigilant, according to a 2018 report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. According to the Irvine Company, the data is only shared with Irvine, Tustin and Newport Beach police departments, but not ICE.

In January, a report from UC Irvine and two human rights groups accused the Orange County Sheriff’s Department of sharing information with ICE. The department was not mentioned in Wednesday’s ACLU report.

Staff writer Alicia Robinson contributed to this story.