Curious how your local police department handles your data after a 911 call, traffic stop, or incident report? There’s a good chance your records, including phone number, address and vehicle info, are being uploaded to LexisNexis, a private data broker that sells access to federal agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). And it often happens without local officials and citizens even realizing it.
American policing that used to run on scattered local files is now being pooled together into a single privatized intelligence network that ICE is tapping every day to boost its arrest numbers. Even in sanctuary cities like Cambridge, MA, where police interactions with ICE are restricted, local police data is being used to help ICE make local arrests.
Two LexisNexis products, the Accurint Virtual Crime Center and Accurint Public Safety Marketplace, help power this data gathering machine. Thousands of local and state law enforcement agencies use these platforms to provide data and gain access to billions of personal records covering over 95 percent of America’s adult population. Police records that most people agree should stay local, including sensitive details about crime victims and minors, are instead pulled into a commercial database that thousands of agencies can search — among them ICE, which is paying LexisNexis $22 million for access to the information.
If this AI-powered data-laundering pipeline sounds invasive, it is. And it’s not just LexisNexis that is powering and profiting from it. Thomson Reuters and Palantir are also supporting — and collaborating on — this massive surveillance network that is tracking far more than undocumented immigrants.
On October 22, the De-ICE Action Network is holding a “Spotlight on LexisNexis” webinar to educate activists about this little-known data pipeline and steps they can take to prevent local police departments from sharing sensitive private data with ICE and other federal agencies. The webinar will feature Shawn Segal, a public interest researcher at FinePrint.Report, an investigative website focused on surveillance, privacy and policing.
To join the 12:15 pm ET webinar or receive a recording, please register here.
As the power and reach of police data sharing has expanded, communities, alarmed by dwindling privacy protections, are finding ways to push back.
In many cases, it’s simply a matter of modifying the police department’s data-sharing agreement with LexisNexis.
Consider Oklahoma City: In April, after public pressure over ICE arrests and privacy concerns, the City Council voted to limit sharing of its police data to 14 regional law enforcement agencies. LexisNexis agreed to the contract renewal with the city, at the same $165,000 price.
“The city kept the tool, but fenced off the data so that only neighboring agencies could share records,” wrote Segal on the FinePrint website. “It’s a useful example for other cities trying to take back control of where their residents’ data goes.”
Maryland is also fighting back. Earlier this month, 10 privacy and civil rights groups filed a complaint with the AG’s Office accusing LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, Flock Safety and four other companies of violating the state’s new privacy law. The law, in force since July 1, prohibits the sale of vehicle location data and other personal data to a government unit engaged in civil immigration enforcement.
“Just as an example, we have seen arrest warrants that say ICE was running license plates,” Shana Khader, legal director of the advocacy group, We Are CASA, told CBS News. “That’s accessing state data in order to find information about these drivers.”
Cambridge is also trying to limit data sharing – most notably, through sanctuary policies that restrict police cooperation – and conversations - with ICE. But data is still slipping out, particularly when it comes to arrests where defendants are fingerprinted. Fingerprinting data is routinely shared with a national police database that ICE is always tracking.
A May 2025 Cambridge police report documents a specific case where an alleged shoplifter who’d been fingerprinted was picked up and arrested by ICE moments after she left the police department property. “It is believed that ICE learned of this arrest after (Leidy Torres) Castano had her fingerprints checked against a national database as part of the standard booking process,” the police report stated.
A new Prison Policy Initiative report on local policing and ICE highlights this specific issue.
“There is currently no federal requirement that state and local police fingerprint everyone arrested and contribute their biometric information to the FBI database,” the report states. “Though we do not know of any states that have pursued this strategy to date, this kind of excessive data sharing raises privacy concerns, and limiting the federal government’s access to state and local records would likely greatly inhibit ICE’s ability to identify targets for arrest.”
Wisdom worth considering, for sure.
