Local police assisted federal immigration agents by repeatedly searching school cameras that record license plate numbers, data show

Police departments across the US are quietly leveraging school district security cameras to assist Donald Trump’s mass immigration enforcement campaign, an investigation by the 74 reveals.

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.

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 are designed to 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 (DHS) enforce federal immigration laws. The Trump administration’s aggressive DHS crackdown, which has grown increasingly unpopular, has had a significant impact on schools.

Educators, parents and students as young as five have been swept up, with immigrant families being targeted during school drop-offs and pick-ups. School parking lots are one place the cameras at the center of these searches can be found, along with other locations in the wider community, such as mounted on utility poles at intersections or along busy commercial streets.

The data raises questions about the degree to which campus surveillance technology intended for student safety is being repurposed to support immigration enforcement.

“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 (UWCHR). 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”.

Flock devices have been installed by more than 100 public school systems nationally, government procurement records show, and audit logs from six Texas school districts show campus camera feeds are captured in a national database that police agencies across the country can access.

School police officers use Flock cameras to investigate “road rage”, “speeding on campus”, “vandalism” and “criminal mischief”, records show. There is no evidence school districts themselves use the devices for immigration-related purposes – or that they’re aware other agencies do so.

Research by UWCHR and reporting by the technology news outlet 404 Media previously revealed that police agencies nationwide were tapping into Flock camera feeds to help federal immigration officials track targets. In some cases, local law enforcement agencies enabled direct sharing of their networks with the US Border Patrol.

Immigration officials’ unprecedented use of surveillance tactics to carry out its controversial mission has faced sharp criticism. That school district cameras are part of that dragnet has not been previously reported.

’The scale of it is phenomenal’

At the Huffman independent school district northeast of Houston, records reveal it was the campus police chief’s administrative assistant who granted border patrol access to district Flock Safety license plate readers in May.

Police departments nationwide also routinely tapped into the eight Flock cameras installed at the 30,000-student Alvin independent school district south of Houston. Over a one-month period from December 2025 through early January, more than 3,100 police agencies conducted more than 733,000 searches on the district’s cameras, the 74’s analysis of public records revealed. Of those, immigration-related reasons were cited 620 times by 30 law enforcement agencies including ones in Florida, Georgia, Indiana and Tennessee.

Flock offers a list of standardized reasons that agencies must choose from when running a search. For the Alvin school district’s cameras, immigration-related reasons identified by the 74 include “Immigration (civil/administrative)” and “Immigration (criminal)”.

The data put into focus the scale of digital surveillance at school districts nationally and “just how dangerous these tools are”, said Ed Vogel, a researcher and organizer with the No Tech Criminalization in Education (NOTICE) Coalition – a national network of researchers and advocates seeking to end mass youth surveillance.

“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,” Vogel said.

The Flock camera audit logs and other public records about their use by school districts were provided exclusively to the 74 by the NOTICE Coalition. The 74 also filed public records requests to obtain information on schools’ use of Flock cameras and conducted an analysis to reveal the extent of the immigration-related searches. Those findings were shared with the law enforcement agencies and school districts mentioned in this story.

Three of the 10 agencies that conducted the most immigration-related searches in the Alvin school district logs participate in the 287(g) program, which deputizes local officers to perform certain immigration enforcement functions and has also become a point of controversy. The program has grown by 600% during Trump’s second term.

Michael Putnal, Alvin school district police chief, directed all questions to district spokesperson Renae Rives, who provided public records to the 74 but did not acknowledge multiple requests for comment.

Amanda Fortenberry, the spokesperson for the Huffman school district, said in an email the district is “reviewing the matters you referenced”, but declined to comment further.

Flock Safety, which operates some 90,000 cameras across 7,000 networks nationally, didn’t respond to the 74’s requests for comment, nor did the DHS.

’We will assist them – no questions asked’

Camera settings information obtained by the 74 through public records requests suggests that Alvin school district police officers are unable to search their own devices for immigration-related purposes. But the school system allows such queries routinely from out-of-state police officers, audit logs reveal.

Flock searches for civil immigration reasons that appeared in the Alvin school logs, such as trying to locate someone who is unlawfully present in the US, were more than two times more frequent than those conducted for investigations involving immigrants suspected or convicted of committing a crime.

Also included among the reasons given for immigration-related searches are “ICE”, in reference to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “ERO proactive crim case research”, an apparent reference to ICE’s enforcement and removal operations division and “CBP Investigation”, an apparent reference to US Customs and Border Protection.

In Carrollton, Georgia, officers routinely use Flock’s nationwide lookup to track suspects outside their jurisdiction, Lt Blake Hitchcock said in an interview. 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, Hitchcock said. He declined to elaborate on specifics.

Federal agents “were working directly” with a Carrollton police officer who had access to the Flock cameras “and they asked him to run it and they did”, Hitchcock said. If federal agents ask his office to help them with an immigration case, Hitchcock said, “we will assist them – no questions asked.”

Flock searches are typically broad national queries, and officers do not select individual cameras, he explained. Instead, with each search request, the system automatically checks every camera that Flock customers share with the nationwide database, including those operated by school districts.

Because a school district is part of the national lookup, Hitchcock said, its cameras will be searched any time another participating agency conducts a nationwide search. He said Flock’s nationwide search was helpful to track people who “go from jurisdiction to jurisdiction to commit crimes”. He pointed to a high-profile child abduction case in 2020 when Carrollton officers used Flock cameras to rescue a one-year-old who was kidnapped at gunpoint about 60 miles away.

In Galveston, Texas, Constable Justin West confirmed that immigration-related searches that appeared in the Alvin school district’s audit logs from his department were tied to the county’s participation in the federal 287(g) program.

County deputies with federal immigration enforcement powers “have been working on arresting targeted criminal illegal aliens”, West wrote in an email, and use Flock cameras “to determine locations and travel patterns of the illegal aliens being sought”.

Galveston police’s Flock searches that appeared in the Alvin school district audit logs led to several arrests, West said, while several of the investigations remain ongoing. Flock logs show the Galveston county searches were conducted for both criminal and civil immigration investigations.

While the Trump administration maintains its immigration crackdown centers on removing dangerous criminals, ICE arrests of people without criminal records surged to 43% in January. US citizens and immigrants with no pending civil immigration actions against them have similarly been detained.

It’s not clear whether every search tagged as immigration-related necessarily was. The police department in Texas City, Texas, denied it used the system to enforce federal immigration laws. While the agency monitors “several thousand Flock cameras across the United States”, captain Brandon Shives said his department’s searches in the Alvin school district log should not have been categorized as immigration-related and that was the result of a “clerical error”.

’Your community and beyond’

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.

“ICE cannot directly access Flock cameras or data,” the company said in a recent blog post. “Local public safety agencies sometimes collaborate with federal partners on serious crimes such as human trafficking, child exploitation or multi-jurisdictional violent crime,” but decisions about “how data is shared are made by the customer that owns the data, not by Flock”.

The company acknowledged in August it ran pilot programs with the DHS to assist federal human trafficking and fentanyl distribution investigations but that “all ongoing federal pilots have been paused” after the initiative faced scrutiny and legal pushback.

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.

“Not only do we place cameras where you need them”, the document notes, “we offer access to available cameras in your community and beyond your jurisdiction.”

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 and finding missing persons.

But he also acknowledged the devices present significant privacy concerns and questioned whether the broad sharing of school-controlled camera data violates federal student privacy rules. The revelation that school-owned Flock cameras are being queried for immigration enforcement purposes, he said, “will cause significant discussions to be had in the near future within many school districts” that contract with the company.

“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.