DHS Held Chicago Police Records for Months, Violating Spy Rules
▼ Summary
– On November 21, 2023, DHS intelligence officers deleted Chicago Police records that had been improperly stored for seven months in violation of a deletion order.
– The data-sharing experiment aimed to test using local gang intelligence to identify undocumented individuals at airports and borders but collapsed due to mismanagement and oversight failures.
– Chicago’s gang data was notoriously inaccurate, containing errors like impossible birthdates and derogatory labels, with no requirement for arrest or conviction to be listed.
– Immigration officers accessed the database over 32,000 times in a decade, exploiting a “known gang members” exception to bypass Chicago’s sanctuary data-sharing restrictions.
– The Brennan Center highlighted that this incident demonstrates how federal intelligence can circumvent local sanctuary laws by packaging and transferring data to immigration enforcement.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) retained Chicago Police Department records for months, directly violating established intelligence oversight rules and raising serious concerns about domestic surveillance overreach. In November 2023, DHS field intelligence officers permanently deleted a significant collection of these records, an action far from routine. This data, which contained information on approximately 900 residents of the Chicago area, had been sitting on a federal server for seven months despite a standing order for its destruction. An internal investigation later confirmed that nearly 800 files were improperly kept, a clear breach of regulations designed to prevent US intelligence operations from targeting legal residents.
The records originated from a private data exchange between DHS analysts and the Chicago Police, conceived as a test to see if local intelligence could help identify undocumented individuals with alleged gang ties at airports and border crossings. This initiative ultimately failed due to what official reports describe as a series of management and oversight breakdowns. Internal memoranda show that a DHS Office of Intelligence & Analysis (I&A) field officer first requested the dataset in the summer of 2021.
The Chicago gang data itself was already widely known to be deeply flawed and unreliable. City inspectors had previously warned that the police department could not guarantee the accuracy of its own records. The database contained glaring errors, including listings for people with birthdates predating 1901 and others who appeared to be small children. Officers had infused the data with blatantly unprofessional and prejudicial language, listing occupations with terms like “SCUM BAG,” “TURD,” or simply “BLACK.” An individual did not need to be arrested or convicted to be added to this list.
Prosecutors and police routinely used these gang designations in legal filings and criminal investigations, influencing outcomes from bail hearings to sentencing. For immigrants, the stakes were even higher. While Chicago’s sanctuary city rules generally prohibit sharing data with immigration authorities, an exception existed for “known gang members,” creating a significant loophole. Records indicate that over a decade, immigration officers accessed this database more than 32,000 times.
The I&A memos, initially obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice, illustrate how a limited data-sharing experiment devolved into a cascade of procedural failures. The request for the Chicago data passed through multiple layers of bureaucratic review without a clear owner, and its legal safeguards were either overlooked or ignored. By the time the data was transferred to an I&A server around April 2022, the officer who initiated the request had already left their position. The project collapsed under the weight of administrative neglect, signatures were missing, required audits were never completed, and the deadline for deleting the data passed unnoticed. The protective measures intended to keep intelligence activities focused on foreign threats, rather than American citizens, had completely broken down.
Confronted with this failure, I&A formally terminated the project in November 2023, deleting the dataset and documenting the entire incident in an official report. Spencer Reynolds, a senior counsel at the Brennan Center, stated that this episode demonstrates how federal intelligence officers can circumvent local sanctuary laws. He explained that this intelligence office acts as a workaround to sanctuary protections that limit cities like Chicago from cooperating directly with ICE. Federal officers can access the local data, repackage it, and then transfer it to immigration enforcement, thereby evading policies created to protect residents.
(Source: Wired)
