DHS has kept Chicago police records for months in violation of domestic spying laws.
On November 21, In the year 2023, field intelligence officers at the Department of Homeland Security quietly deleted a trove of Chicago Police Department records. This was no ordinary purge.
For seven months, the data — records requested from about 900 Chicagoland residents — sat on a federal server in violation of a takedown order issued by an intelligence watchdog. A subsequent investigation found that nearly 800 files were being kept, which the report later found violated laws designed to prevent domestic intelligence operations from targeting legal residents of the United States. The records stemmed from a private exchange between DHS analysts and the Chicago police, a test of how local intelligence might feed federal government watch lists. The idea was to see if street-level data could reveal illegal gang members in airport queues and at border crossings. The experiment collapsed amid what government reports describe as a chain of mismanagement and oversight failures.
Internal memos reviewed by WIRED show that the dataset was first requested by a field officer in DHS’s Office of Information and Analysis (I&A) in the summer of 2021. At the time, Chicago gang data was already notorious for inconsistencies and errors. City investigators had warned that police could not guarantee its authenticity. Entries created by the police included people apparently born before 1901 and others who appeared to be infants. Some of them were identified by the police as gang members but were not connected to any particular group.
The police showed their disdain for the data, listing people’s occupations as “SCUM bag”, “TURD” or simply “BLACK”. Neither arrest nor conviction was necessary to be included in this list.
Prosecutors and police relied on the names of alleged gang members in their cases and investigations. They shadowed the accused through bail hearings and sentencing. It was extra weight for the immigrants. Chicago’s sanctuary laws prohibited further data sharing with immigration officers, but at the time, it left a backdoor open to “known gang members.” Over a decade, immigration officers have used the database more than 32,000 times, records show.
The I&A memos — first obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice in New York through a public records request — show that what began as a limited data-sharing experiment at DHS quickly turned into a cascade of procedural errors. Requests for Chicagoland data were made in review layers without a clear owner, legal safeguards were ignored or ignored. By the time the data landed on the I&A server around April 2022, the field officer who initiated the transfer had left his post. The experiment ended up falling apart due to its own paperwork. Signatures were lost, audits were never recorded, and the removal deadline expired without notice. The guardrails that were supposed to point the intelligence work outward—toward foreign threats, not Americans—simply failed.
Faced with the error, I&A eventually killed the project in November 2023, wiping the dataset and memorializing the breach in an official report.
Spencer Reynolds, a senior adviser at the Brennan Center, says the episode shows how federal intelligence officers can override local sanctuary laws. “This intelligence agency is a solution to the so-called sanctuary protections that limit cities like Chicago from working directly with ICE,” he says. “Federal intelligence officers can access data, package it, and then hand it over to immigration enforcement, circumventing important policies to protect residents.”
