Imagine your child’s school, a place of learning and safety, becoming a surveillance hub for immigration enforcement. Sounds like a dystopian novel, right? But that’s exactly what’s happening across the U.S., and it’s sparking a heated debate.
An investigation by The 74 has uncovered a startling trend: police departments are quietly using school district security cameras to aid in Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown. These cameras, installed to protect students, are now being repurposed to assist in mass immigration enforcement—a move that’s raising serious ethical and privacy concerns.
Here’s where it gets controversial: audit logs from Texas school districts reveal that police are searching a national database of automated license plate reader data, including feeds from school cameras, for immigration-related investigations. These logs, spanning just one month, show hundreds of thousands of searches. The cameras, manufactured by Flock Safety, capture license plate numbers, timestamps, and other details, which are then uploaded to a cloud server. Schools can choose to share this data with other police agencies in Flock’s national network, and many are doing just that.
And this is the part most people miss: while school police officers use these cameras for legitimate purposes like investigating road rage or vandalism, there’s no evidence that school districts themselves are using the devices for immigration enforcement—or even aware that other agencies are doing so. Yet, multiple law enforcement leaders have admitted to conducting these searches to help the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) enforce federal immigration laws.
The impact? Immigrant families are being targeted during school drop-offs and pick-ups, with educators, parents, and even children as young as five getting caught in the crossfire. School parking lots, once safe zones, are now part of a broader surveillance network that extends into the wider community.
But here’s the real question: Is this an appropriate use of technology meant to ensure student safety? Phil Neff, research coordinator at the University of Washington Center for Human Rights (UWCHR), thinks not. He calls it a ‘strain on any sense of appropriate use of this technology.’
Flock Safety’s cameras have been installed in over 100 public school systems nationwide, and audit logs from six Texas school districts confirm that campus camera feeds are part of a national database accessible to police agencies across the country. While school districts use these cameras for legitimate campus safety issues, the broader sharing of this data for immigration enforcement is a different story.
Here’s where it gets even more contentious: research by UWCHR and reporting by 404 Media have previously shown that police agencies nationwide are tapping into Flock camera feeds to assist federal immigration officials. In some cases, local law enforcement has even enabled direct sharing of their networks with the U.S. Border Patrol. This unprecedented use of surveillance tactics has faced sharp criticism, especially as it involves school district cameras—a fact that hasn’t been widely reported until now.
Take the Huffman Independent School District near Houston, for example. Records show that the campus police chief’s administrative assistant granted Border Patrol access to the district’s Flock Safety license plate readers in May. Similarly, the Alvin Independent School District, with 30,000 students, saw over 733,000 searches conducted on its eight Flock cameras in just one month. Of those, 620 were immigration-related, carried out by 30 law enforcement agencies across states like Florida, Georgia, Indiana, and Tennessee.
The scale of this surveillance is phenomenal, and it’s something that’s hard for individuals to fully grasp. Ed Vogel, a researcher with the No Tech Criminalization in Education (NOTICE) Coalition, warns of the dangers of these tools, especially when used for purposes far beyond student safety.
Flock Safety, which operates around 90,000 cameras across 7,000 networks nationally, hasn’t commented on the issue, nor has the DHS. But the data speaks for itself: civil immigration searches, like locating individuals unlawfully present in the U.S., were more than twice as frequent as those for criminal investigations.
Here’s the kicker: while some argue that this surveillance helps track dangerous criminals, ICE arrests of people without criminal records surged to 43% in January. U.S. citizens and immigrants with no pending civil immigration actions have also been detained. This raises serious questions about the scope and ethics of these practices.
So, what’s next? As Adam Wandt, an attorney and professor, points out, license plate readers can be invaluable for solving crimes and finding missing persons. But the broad sharing of school-controlled camera data for immigration enforcement? That’s a line many believe should not be crossed. It’s a debate that’s just beginning, and it’s one that every community needs to have.
This story was produced by The 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in the U.S.
