40 Hill Democrats Warn Their Party's Governors of 'Inadvertent' DMV Data Sharing With ICE
A coalition of 40 Democratic members of the Senate and House warned Democratic governors of 19 states and territories that they may be “inadvertently sharing drivers’ data with federal immigration authorities.”
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The lawmakers, in letters Wednesday, told the governors that states were providing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies with "frictionless, self-service access to the personal data of all of your residents.” The letters urged the governors to block ICE access to this information.
Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, Washington and Minnesota have blocked ICE access to DMV data, and Oregon is in the process of doing so, the letters noted. They urged the 19 state leaders, including Arizona, California, Kansas and Maryland, to do the same.
The House and Senate members noted that the practice of states sharing other data with federal agencies is far from new. For more than 20 years, “every state and the District of Columbia (DC) [has] made their residents’ data available to approximately 18,000 federal, state, local, tribal and territorial law enforcement agencies,” the letters said. As such, federal agencies “have direct access to” resident data that can be retrieved “without the knowledge or assistance of … state employees.”
In addition, the lawmakers said 41 states also share drivers’ license photos, which can then be analyzed with facial recognition software.
Although some states have “laws ... or policies ... intended to prevent DMV data from being shared with or accessed by immigration authorities,” they are often “ineffective,” they said. Still, “each state can decide for itself the data it makes available,” as well as “the queries it permits federal and out-of-state law enforcement agencies to make of its data, and the specific agencies that can (or cannot) access its data.”