Police Use School Cameras for Immigration Searches, Audit Logs Reveal
Police departments across the United States are quietly leveraging school district security cameras to assist federal immigration enforcement efforts, an investigation has revealed. Hundreds of thousands of audit logs spanning a month show police are searching a national database of automated license plate reader data, including from school cameras, for immigration-related investigations.
School Surveillance Repurposed
The audit logs originate from Texas school districts that contract with Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company that manufactures artificial intelligence-powered license plate readers and other surveillance technology. Flock's cameras capture license plate numbers, timestamps and other identifying details, which are uploaded to a cloud server. Flock customers, including schools, can decide whether to share their information with other police agencies in the company's national network.
Multiple law enforcement leaders acknowledged they conducted the searches in the audit logs to help the Department of Homeland Security enforce federal immigration laws. Educators, parents and students as young as five have been swept up, with immigrant families being targeted during school drop-offs and pick-ups.
"This just really underscores how far-reaching these systems can be," said Phil Neff, research coordinator at the University of Washington Center for Human Rights. Out-of-state law enforcement agencies conducting searches that are unrelated to campus safety but include school district security cameras "really strains any sense of the appropriate use of this technology."
Scale of Surveillance
Flock devices have been installed by more than 100 public school systems nationally, government procurement records show. Audit logs from six Texas school districts reveal campus camera feeds are captured in a national database that police agencies across the country can access.
At the 30,000-student Alvin independent school district south of Houston, more than 3,100 police agencies conducted over 733,000 searches on the district's cameras during a one-month period. Immigration-related reasons were cited 620 times by 30 law enforcement agencies including ones in Florida, Georgia, Indiana and Tennessee.
"The scale of it is phenomenal, and it's something that I think is difficult for individual people in their cities, towns and communities to fully appreciate," said Ed Vogel, a researcher and organizer with the No Tech Criminalization in Education Coalition.
Law Enforcement Cooperation
In Carrollton, Georgia, officers routinely use Flock's nationwide lookup to track suspects outside their jurisdiction. Immigration-related searches that appear in the Alvin school district's audit log by the Carrollton police department were conducted to assist federal agents at the request of the DHS.
"If federal agents ask my office to help them with an immigration case, we will assist them – no questions asked," said Lt Blake Hitchcock of the Carrollton police department.
In Galveston, Texas, Constable Justin West confirmed that immigration-related searches were tied to the county's participation in the federal 287(g) program, which deputizes local officers to perform certain immigration enforcement functions.
Privacy Concerns and Company Response
Flock Safety has repeatedly stated that it does not provide the DHS with direct access to its cameras and that all data-sharing decisions are made by local customers, including school districts. The company acknowledged in August it ran pilot programs with the DHS to assist federal human trafficking and fentanyl distribution investigations but said "all ongoing federal pilots have been paused" after facing scrutiny and legal pushback.
Adam Wandt, an attorney and associate professor at New York City's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said license plate readers could be invaluable tools for solving serious crimes but also present significant privacy concerns.
"School districts are in a unique position, they have a unique level of responsibility to protect their students in specific ways, including their privacy," Wandt said. The revelation that school-owned Flock cameras are being queried for immigration enforcement purposes "will cause significant discussions to be had in the near future within many school districts" that contract with the company.
Public records provided by the Alvin school district, which began purchasing Flock cameras in 2023 and has since spent more than $50,000 on eight devices, include Flock marketing materials that tout the ability to share data with other police agencies. The document notes the system offers "access to available cameras in your community and beyond your jurisdiction."
