Does Flock share data with ICE?

Not directly, according to the company, and not under any contract. Flock Safety’s own answer to the question is “No. Flock does not work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),” and it states plainly that “Flock does not have a contract with ICE.”¹ The company’s position is that it never shares data on its own: the police departments, cities, and businesses that buy the cameras own what they record and decide who else may search it.¹

That is a narrower claim than “ICE has never used Flock data,” and the record since 2025 shows three ways immigration enforcement has reached it. Federal agencies inside the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had direct access during pilot programs Flock ran in 2025, among them Homeland Security Investigations (HSI)¹⁹¹¹ — one of ICE’s three operational directorates.² Local and state officers have searched the network on behalf of immigration agents, typing reasons such as “ICE” and “immigration” into the search log.³ And some agencies have their cameras alert on a federal hotlist of vehicles that only ICE can populate.⁴

The first route is closed, by Flock’s account: its federal pilots ended in August 2025, and sharing with a federal agency is now off by default and must be granted by a local customer, one relationship at a time.¹ The second and third routes run through decisions each local agency makes, which is exactly where Flock says responsibility belongs. Flock’s newer settings let an agency block immigration searches of its own cameras,¹⁵ but they depend on the reason or offense type the searching officer enters, not the purpose behind the search.

Flock’s fullest statement is a post first published January 6, 2026 and revised since; the page is now dated July 24, 2026.¹ Its argument rests on ownership: “Decisions about whether, when, and how data is shared are made by the customer that owns the data, not by Flock.” And: “If a local agency chooses not to collaborate with any federal entity, including ICE, Flock has no ability to override that decision.”¹

Its contracts have been read more broadly. In October 2025 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reported that Flock’s default agreement licensed the company to “disclose the Agency Data… for investigative purposes,” even where a department restricted sharing.⁶ Flock later said some of its contract language had “confused the public” on ownership.⁵ Its online terms, updated August 21, 2026, limit the license to providing and improving its services, and treat other sharing without the customer’s authorization as a breach.⁷

Flock’s post also says the company has federal customers of its own — National Parks, Veterans Affairs hospitals, and military bases — which can set up one-to-one sharing with other agencies “where applicable laws allow it, and only when communities explicitly allow federal data access.”¹

It also publishes a timeline of the federal pilots the company says it ran before it stopped offering them in August 2025: the FBI from 2021 to 2023, the National Park Service in Tennessee, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in Louisville and Nashville, and, in 2025, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (January 2 to April 5), Homeland Security Investigations (March 3 to May 1), and Customs and Border Protection (May 9 to August 24).¹

The pilots surfaced piecemeal in August 2025. Colorado’s 9News reported that police in Loveland were sharing their cameras directly with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). 404 Media then reported, from data released by three police departments, that CBP “regularly searched more than 80,000 Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras,” and that one police department it spoke to “did not know or understand that it was sharing data with CBP.” Flock told the outlet it had “paused all federal pilots.”⁸

On August 25, 2025, chief executive Garrett Langley acknowledged that “some of our public statements inadvertently provided inaccurate information.” Flock had run “limited pilots” with CBP and HSI, he said, to help them fight human trafficking and fentanyl distribution. “We clearly communicated poorly. We also didn’t create distinct permissions and protocols in the Flock system to ensure local compliance for federal agency users.”⁹ The same day, Illinois’s secretary of state, whose office had been auditing Flock, alleged that giving CBP access to Illinois data through the pilot put the company “in direct violation of Illinois law”; a Flock spokesperson said the company disagreed with his legal assertions.¹⁰ We cover the audit in what a Flock camera is, the statute in our law reference, and the cancellations that followed in our cancellation tracker.

Senator Ron Wyden’s October 16, 2025 letter to Langley added detail Flock had not published. According to the letter, Flock officials confirmed to his office in September that the pilot gave access to CBP, HSI, the Secret Service, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and that, as the letter puts it, “CBP and HSI conducted approximately 200 and 175 searches respectively.” Flock also told his office that “due to internal miscommunication, customers were inaccurately informed that Flock did not have any relationship with DHS, while pilot programs with sub-agencies of DHS were briefly active.”¹¹ The Secret Service does not appear in Flock’s published pilot timeline.¹

In Washington state, researchers at the University of Washington Center for Human Rights obtained audit logs through public records requests and reported searches by “US Border Patrol [Federal]” in the logs of at least 17 Washington agencies from at least May 9 through August 24, 2025 — the span of the CBP pilot — made by dozens of different users giving reasons such as “USBP,” “USBP/HSI,” and “immigration.” They said at least ten of those departments had not explicitly authorized Border Patrol to search their data.¹² Flock responded that the report contained “many mischaracterizations and factual errors,” said the researchers had not contacted it, and said it does not automatically enroll agencies in data sharing; its response did not address the search counts.¹³

With the pilots over and federal sharing off by default, the main remaining route is the one 404 Media documented first. In May 2025 it reported on search logs obtained through a public records request to police in Danville, Illinois, showing officers across the country searching Danville’s cameras with reasons including “immigration,” “ICE,” “ICE+ERO” (ICE’s deportation arm, Enforcement and Removal Operations), and “ICE WARRANT.” With statements from the departments involved, it counted more than 4,000 national and statewide lookups done “either at the behest of the federal government or as an ‘informal’ favor to federal law enforcement, or with a potential immigration focus.”³ Flock’s search form asks for a reason, by default in a free-text box, and that field is how these were found. The reason has not always been mandatory: until August 2025 an opt-in setting let officers searching other agencies’ data enter a case number and no reason at all.¹¹

The pattern has recurred in logs pulled elsewhere. The Washington researchers reported a Yakima County Sheriff’s Office user who ran two searches in May 2025 with the reason “ICE,” each applied to 89 networks.¹² In Dayton, Ohio, the city suspended its cameras in 2026 after police found more than 7,000 immigration-related searches by outside entities, which officials called “egregious violations of policy.”¹⁴ In July 2026 a Star Tribune investigation found that about 30 state, county, and federal agencies had searched camera data in at least eight Twin Cities suburbs for immigration enforcement purposes between November 2025 and March 2026, during the federal enforcement surge known as Operation Metro Surge; Fridley alone saw more than 390,000 searches by outside agencies in a single month before it limited access to Minnesota agencies.¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷ Minnesota law requires each access to rest on “a reasonable suspicion that the data are pertinent to an active criminal investigation.”¹⁸ A Flock spokesman said the company believes immigration searches are allowed under Minnesota law; a Hopkins police captain disagreed: “It’s a criminal investigative tool, not a civil enforcement mechanism.”¹⁷

Logs prove what officers typed, not always why. In August 2026 the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project and LatinoJustice PRLDEF named four New York departments whose searches carried reasons such as “ICE,” “Wanted by ICE,” and “Immigration (civil/administrative),” and argued that later searches of the same plates labeled only “investigation” suggested more immigration searches hidden behind generic reasons.¹⁹²⁰ The police chief in Beacon, one of the four, said his department’s entry was a dispatcher’s error on a Metro-North commuter’s missing-car check, and produced a recording of the request.²¹ The field can mislead the other way too: Wyden’s letter noted that in 11.4 million searches analyzed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), more than 14 percent gave only the word “investigation” without a case number.¹¹

A third route involves no search at all. Agencies can have their cameras alert on plates listed in the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) hotlists, and EFF reported in June 2026 that one of them, the Immigration Violator file, is populated exclusively by ICE and includes plates tied to administrative warrants, which ICE issues without judicial review. According to Flock, ICE does not receive the alert; the local agency does, and may contact ICE. Of 13 agencies that answered EFF’s records requests, two had the list switched on, including Sparks, Nevada, whose own transparency portal lists immigration enforcement as a prohibited use.⁴

Flock’s changes since mid-2025 fall into two groups. The first narrows federal access. In August 2025 federal agencies became a separate “Federal” organization type, removed from statewide and national lookup and limited to one-to-one sharing; since January 2026 any agency can turn off all federal sharing with a single setting.¹⁹

The second tries to control what other agencies search for. From June 2025 Flock automatically blocked searches whose stated reason matched immigration-related keywords, first in a handful of states and from November 2025 for any agency that opts in.¹ Wyden’s office concluded the filters were “easy to circumvent,” because the reason is free text and an officer who types “investigation” passes straight through.¹¹ Flock has since given the field more structure: a required offense type from the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) since December 2025,¹ and offense filtering for sharing, announced August 13, 2026, which lets a city choose the offense types other agencies may search its cameras for. Flock’s example is allowing searches “only for a stolen vehicle, missing person, or violent crime while blocking searches related to immigration enforcement.” Flock also says case codes will be required on law enforcement searches by the end of 2026, with an emergency bypass that is flagged for administrator review.⁵

The limits are the ones critics named from the start: each control is a setting a customer chooses, and each depends on the searching officer’s own description of the search. EFF called offense filtering one of Flock’s “likely easier-to-bypass reforms.”²² None of the controls, as Flock describes them, prevents an officer who is authorized to search from running a plate for a federal colleague under a criminal offense type. Flock’s position is that this is not its call: whether to collaborate with federal agencies “is governed by local law, agency policy, and community values, not by Flock.”¹

There is no federal statute on license plate readers, so whether a search for ICE is lawful depends on the state, and in some places on city policy. Of the statutes in our state-by-state law reference, four name immigration enforcement expressly, either barring agencies from using plate data for it or barring them from sharing data that may be used for it: Illinois, Washington, New Mexico, and Connecticut (Connecticut’s from October 1, 2026). Washington’s 2026 Driver Privacy Act, for example, makes it unlawful for any agency to use a reader “for immigration investigation or enforcement,” and requires vendors to build technical controls preventing access by nonauthorized agencies, “including federal civil immigration enforcement.”²³

Other states get at the question more broadly. California’s attorney general has advised since 2023 that SB 34, the state’s ALPR law, does not permit California law enforcement agencies to share ALPR information “with private entities or out-of-state or federal agencies,”²⁴ and Flock says it disabled national lookup for every California agency in March 2025.¹ Police in Oxnard say that step followed a vendor-based issue that had switched the feature on for some California agencies, and in February 2026 they suspended their cameras after an audit found that, despite “California only” settings, a vendor-enabled “nationwide query” had let agencies outside the state search their data, among them a federal Veterans Affairs police department whose two queries, the audit said, concerned criminal investigations, not immigration.¹⁴²⁵ Oregon bars sharing plate data with federal and out-of-state government entities except for a law enforcement purpose the act authorizes,²⁶ and Minnesota ties every access to an active criminal investigation.¹⁸ New York has no ALPR statute, but its new Local Cops, Local Crimes Act bars local police from formal or informal agreements to assist federal immigration enforcement, and the New York report’s authors argue that routine plate searches at ICE’s request could violate it.¹⁹²⁰

Elsewhere, a local officer who runs a plate for an immigration agent may be acting entirely within the law. As the Washington researchers put it, in some jurisdictions local collaboration with ICE “is perfectly legal.”¹² That is why the answer to “does Flock share data with ICE” so often turns into a question about a particular police department.

Start with the transparency portal. Flock says more than 1,500 agencies publish one, giving the public “a direct view of your policy, retention period, sharing partners, and search activity.”⁵ Three things are worth looking for: whether immigration enforcement is listed as a prohibited use, whether any organization with access carries Flock’s “Federal” label,⁹ and which hotlists the agency uses.⁴ Not every agency publishes one; our guide to what residents can do covers the alternatives.

Request the audit logs. Flock produces two: an organization audit of searches by the agency’s own users, and a network audit of searches of the agency’s cameras by everyone else.¹² The network audit, which shows outside agencies searching your city’s cameras, is the kind of record behind most of the findings above. Expect friction: the Washington researchers say some cities refused their requests, arguing the audits were not public records,¹² and Flock says it began masking “sensitive fields” in network audits in December 2025.¹ State law can help. Minnesota makes ALPR audit trail data public unless otherwise classified,¹⁸ and Washington agencies must post annual reports from December 2027 listing how many times their data was shared with or accessed by another government entity, and which ones.²³ Asking which NCIC hotlist topics an agency has switched on is how EFF found the two using ICE’s list.⁴

Read the logs carefully. Sites such as Have I Been Flocked? republish audit logs obtained through records requests,¹⁹ but the data may be incomplete, and every reason in it is whatever an officer entered.²¹ A single “ICE” is evidence worth asking about, not a finding.

Take it to the people who sign the contract. Sharing settings, hotlist choices, and the contract itself are local decisions, and several cities have ended their programs after disclosures like these; they are in our tracker of cities that dropped Flock. To see how many readers have been documented where you live, start with the map or the camera index by state and city.