Exclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College Campuses

(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Shutterstock)

IMAGINE THIS: AN UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANT gets into her car, just as she does every day. She drives past the local college campus, one county over, on her way to work. Then, after finishing a shift, she heads home, when she’s set upon by an unmarked SUV with no lights. Terrified, she guns it through a traffic chokepoint. Maybe she was imagining things. Arriving home, she starts unpacking her car when two unmarked vehicles hurtle onto her property. ICE agents surround her. She’d been clocked by cameras on the college campus, which fed the data to federal authorities tracking down targets for immigration enforcement.

This isn’t Minority Report. It’s a massive, smart surveillance, enabled system that is already becoming part of the Trump administration’s deportation machinery.

The use of this system has become so pronounced that a new national campaign is set to debut this summer with the aim of ridding college campuses of Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs), specialized surveillance cameras that turn visual information into searchable data.

The Emergency Campaign to Support Higher Education (ECSHE), a grassroots coalition of students, faculty, labor, and alumni, along with the progressive group Schools Drop ICE, aims to call attention to the use of ALPRs by Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company whose cameras and services are used by over 5,000 law enforcement agencies across 49 states. Ultimately, the activists are hoping to see Flock no longer deployed on campuses at all. The group is zeroing in on 75 universities and colleges publicly identified as having Flock contracts.

These activists argue that Flock’s ALPR system is being abused by local police and, through partner agencies, ICE. It is becoming a tool in the Trump administration’s deportation program, a program that has already shifted from one targeting criminals to one threatening all undocumented people and even people with legal status regardless of how long they’ve called the United States their home.

Flock Safety and companies like it, the campaign will argue, enrich themselves off government contracts while normalizing ubiquitous, silent surveillance.

A spokesperson for Flock told me that the company has no contracts with ICE or DHS.

But the organizers of the campaign explain that it isn’t necessarily a matter of formal contracts between the company and the feds. Local police departments, they say, coordinate with ICE and run searches on behalf of it and other federal agencies. Activists also claim to have heard of instances where police have shared Flock system passwords directly with ICE agents for the purpose of immigration searches.

Certainly, the type of identification made possible by networked Flock cameras and ALPRs aligns neatly with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s new supposed emphasis on avoiding the messy public confrontations that characterized the first year of Trump’s mass deportation campaign. (That aim may already have been dashed with ICE agents killing Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a small business owner and father of three U.S. citizen sons, in Houston this week.) If federal agents have access to ubiquitous surveillance tools to track immigrants before swooping in, they will presumably be able to move more swiftly and stealthily.

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WHEN A CAR DRIVES BY a Flock camera, the ALPR captures and records the license plates, the car’s location, its color, and a timestamp.

‘If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about,’ goes the old saw. But as ECSHE executive director Ethan Rome argues, the system can be, and often is, easily abused: Police chiefs and beat cops alike have already been caught running the license plates of their wives or exes or romantic rivals through the system.

“Very rarely, someone does something stupid. They use it to figure out where an ex-girlfriend is or something like that,” said Dan Haley, Flock’s chief legal officer, in a radio interview. “That’s actually the most common thing.”

“Common” might be exactly the right word for it. Take for instance an Illinois police officer named, uh, William Copp, who ran the license plates of three women he had dated, as well as the license plate of an ex-boyfriend of one of those women, through the Flock system 140 times during an eighteen-month period.

Copp is not a lone bad apple. The Institute for Justice, drawing just on press reports and public records, found at least twenty-one examples of police officers using Flock systems to enable stalking, including by men who have since been arrested or forced to resign. Among the cases were a Georgia police chief who was arrested, an Iowa sheriff who ran his wife’s license plate 700 times prior to retiring, and a Kansas police chief who “ran his ex-girlfriend’s plate 164 times and her new boyfriend’s 64 times before resigning.”

When I pressed Flock Safety on these incidents, the firm’s public relations manager, Paris Lewbel, sent me a press release detailing how its audit system had led to the termination and arrest of five officers for the alleged abuse of the license plate readers.

“Technology doesn’t create misconduct. People do,” said company cofounder Paige Todd.

That’s true as far as it goes, but this powerful technology is primed for further abuse, especially when put toward an illiberal state agenda. And it’s not just a matter of staffing safeguards in place as police departments implement these systems: The tools themselves open up disturbing new possibilities.

For example, the Flock system has incorporated an AI functionality that allows for deeper searching. It can be used to identify markers beyond just license plates and car dimensions. So, say, a Los Angeles Lakers bumper sticker could be used to help find a driver. But that same tool could just as easily be used to instead track, say, a “No Kings” bumper sticker, opening up the possibility of digitally surveilling or profiling people with different political views.

“Their big thing is the license-plate capturing,” Rome told me. “But they capture other things,” and “thanks to AI, what would have taken a year to pore through five years ago can take a couple hours to write algorithms now.”

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IN ITS EFFORT TO GET FLOCK SAFETY off college campuses, ECSHE is seeking personal testimony of people targeted by ICE through the company’s surveillance systems. But the data we already have on that subject is deeply concerning in its scale and scope.

Last summer, Flock Safety told Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) that 75 percent of its law enforcement customers had opted in to the company’s National Lookup Tool, a system that allows thousands of agencies to search Flock data, which includes roughly tens of thousands of local networks and cameras. (Sen. Wyden has raised national security concerns about the threat of malicious cyber actors gaining access to the system and the vast amounts of information it contains.)

Anonymous researchers who shared their data with 404 Media found that in just under a year, from June 2024, before Trump’s re-election, to May 2025, police used the system to make millions of searches, including “more than 4,000 searches that contained immigration keywords” such as “ICE,” “immigration,” or “ERO” (Enforcement and Removal Operations).

Strikingly, the researchers found that explicit “immigration” searches happened only during the Trump administration, suggesting a change in policy or strategy at some level, and strongly implying that many of these searches were being conducted on behalf of or in partnership with ICE.

Because Flock’s National Lookup Tool permits users from any opted-in organization to search the data of any other opted-in organization, state and local jurisdictions that join may lose some control over who or what is being surveilled within their boundaries, but not only that: Without performing a network audit, they may not even have even basic awareness of whether, how often, and at what scale these searches of their cameras and data are happening.

As an illustration of just how much ALPR information is being made available through the lookup tool, 404 Media reports that the Dallas Police Department’s “ICE+ERO”, related searches on just March 6 of last year accessed data from more than 6,500 different individual Flock camera networks comprising more than 77,000 total devices.

Flock is facing a growing backlash in some cities where its technology has been deployed. This past May, an audit by the Dayton, Ohio police department found that its cameras were searched more than 7,000 times for immigration enforcement purposes in contravention of city policy. Unsure if the cameras are actually off or not, city workers have taken to covering them with trash bags.

A company spokesperson told me Flock “has built filters that block searches tied to immigration enforcement. Those filters can be activated at any time by the agency’s Flock administrator, and they are applied automatically in certain states where required by law.” That phrasing suggests individual agencies have a lot of discretion when it comes to blocking immigration-related searches, whether to limit methods of accessing its own data by users in Flock’s larger network, or to prevent its agents from conducting such searches across Flock’s network.

An Electronic Frontier Foundation piece from last month titled “Are Your Local Police Using Flock Safety ALPRs to Scan for Immigrants?” also revealed that law enforcement agencies are cross-referencing Flock’s plate data against the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) “hotlists,” which associate specific plates with “topics” such as “stolen vehicle” and “missing person.” One hotlist contains plates that have been added to the system and tagged with a label by just one agency: ICE. The label? “Immigration Violator.”

It is possible for agencies to opt in to receive alerts for different NCIC hotlists, and “if Immigration Violator is selected, the local agency will receive an alert that a vehicle ICE is looking for has been sighted,” EFF investigator Dave Maass writes.

As part of its anti-ALPR campaign, ECSHE is offering a “campaign-in-a-box,” a robust toolkit intended for rapid adoption by students. The campaign is active in universities in California, as well as on the East Coast and in Chicago. ECSHE is looking to expand to major universities in the South and Southwest, including Texas and Arizona.

“These are key states where we know for a fact that enforcement is happening in college campuses on a daily basis,” a lead organizer for Schools Drop ICE told me. “It’s happening five minutes from where I live [in Texas] but is not being highlighted and documented nationally, like it was in Minnesota, because of the state we’re in.”

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Flock Safety and the “AI War Machine”

THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST FLOCK should be seen as one part of a larger pushback against the weaponization of modern technology for immigration and law enforcement.

Kat Finneran, a doctoral candidate at Ohio State University whose research deals with political geography, technology, and control, describes Flock as a component of the government’s “AI war machine.” That machine also includes companies like Palantir, the Peter Thiel-founded, AI-powered data-analytics firm, and Anduril, the maker of autonomous weapons and surveillance systems that reportedly counts Vice President JD Vance among its investors.

“In science fiction we had only really thought about a camera on your private porch or at Kroger. But this is one eye, one vision across it all,” Finneran said of the new generation of surveillance companies like Flock.1

Opposing Flock at OSU is complicated by a provision in state law that forbids the public from requesting Flock data or auditing Flock data requests; as a result, most of what is happening involving the data remains out of public view, Finneran said. This lack of visibility has, if anything, contributed to larger anxieties about the purposes and applications of the technology. Finneran describes paranoia across a campus where pro-Palestine and climate justice groups feel afraid to meet or discuss issues.

Finneran described a meeting that students held last month with Monica Moll, OSU’s associate vice president for public safety, as part of the effort to push back against Flock on campus. While the university would not be moving away from using Flock technology, Moll guardedly added that administrators were open to the students’ concerns that the system could be used in a more responsible manner, Finneran recalled. At the time OSU adopted and installed Flock technology, the message was, the university may not have anticipated some of the more troubling possibilities for ways the company’s cameras and data system can be used.

Similar frictions over Flock Safety recently erupted at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. Tobias Halpern, a 19-year-old student, worked to get Flock’s seventeen cameras off the Cal Poly campus and eventually received word that the administration would not renew its contract with the company after its current contract ends in May 2027.

Halpern’s journey to activism may be instructive. He first learned of ALPRs from YouTuber Benn Jordan.

“I was like ‘Wow, this shit sucks,’ but then I kind of forgot about it,” he told me. “Then I went back to school and saw them all over Cal Poly.” Halpern started speaking out on campus, and soon after, he began DeFlockSLO, an organization meant to get the word out about Flock’s presence on campus and provide tools to students for pushing back on the issue. Facing resistance from an administration led by a stubborn president, Halpern said he and his fellow student activists finally broke through when they started reaching out to incoming students and parents groups, and, through them, they found a way to trouble the waters of Cal Poly’s revenue streams.

Since Cal Poly is designated a Hispanic-Serving Institution, Halpern says the school has been strict about refusing ICE access to the campus, but letting Flock cameras, which produce images that could be accessed by ICE, onto the campus seemed like a violation of that spirit.

“It’s something we had to come to terms with. The ICE and Flock connection is part of the reason Flock is the worst vendor out there,” Halpern said. But “at least on our libertarian campus, the ‘Police-[are]-following-you-everywhere-you-go’ argument worked way better.”

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1Given how many companies founded or funded by Peter Thiel and his acolytes have names drawn from Tolkien, Palantir, Anduril, Mithril, Narya, Valar, and so on, it’s ironic how many of these firms have been involved in developed liberty-endangering tools that resemble the malicious Eye of Sauron.