Exclusive-Democratic-led states are inadvertently sharing drivers’ data with ICE, officials say

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By Raphael Satter

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Democratic-led states are inadvertently making their drivers’ data available to U.S. immigration authorities through a little-understood digital loophole, a group of lawmakers said Wednesday.

In letters released Wednesday, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden and 39 other Democratic lawmakers urged like-minded governors to ensure that their residents’ data wasn’t being vacuumed up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has become the speartip of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation program.

“We urge you to block ICE’s access,” the letters said. “This commonsense step will improve public safety and guard against Trump officials using your state’s data for unjustified, politicized actions, while still allowing continued collaboration on serious crimes.”

Drivers’ license data is shared between state, local, and federal police forces through a nonprofit organization called Nlets. ICE and another Department of Homeland Security body, Homeland Security Investigations, also have access to the system, the letter said, and the two agencies together accounted for nearly 900,000 queries against the database in the year prior to Oct. 1.

Several Democratic states, as well as scores of counties and cities, put various levels of restriction on law enforcement cooperation with ICE. But the letter said that only a handful of states – including New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Minnesota – had blocked ICE from accessing the data they shared via Nlets, in part because state government employees weren’t aware of where it was going.

“Because of the technical complexity of Nlets’ system, few state government officials understand how their state is sharing residents’ data with federal and out-of-state agencies,” the letter said.

ICE did not return messages seeking comment. Nlets, whose acronym harks back to an earlier name, the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, also did not return messages. Governors’ offices in the four states identified as having blocked ICE, as well as Washington state, which the letter said had recently barred ICE from its data, and Oregon, which the letter said was in the process of doing so, did not return messages.

The push to cut ICE off from state data is another example of how state and local officials are trying to thwart or slow Trump’s mass deportation effort. 

But Ryan Shapiro, the executive director of the government transparency group Property of the People, said it was also an illustration of how data-swapping arrangements between state, local, and federal law enforcement bodies are often so complicated that officials don’t understand what they’re sharing about their citizens. 

“State agencies are often far better at collecting information than they are at safeguarding it,” he said. 

(Reporting by Raphael Satter, Editing by Nick Zieminski)