Chat Room Season 2 goes analog
President Donald Trump is returning to office in January, and he’s bringing along an even more aggressive immigration policy. This time, he’s not just focused on drug dealers and other criminals — he’s promising to deport whole families if a member is undocumented.
“I don’t want to be breaking up families, so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back,” Trump said in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday.
In the face of such calls, lawmakers in so-called “sanctuary cities” are again preparing to use local and state level protections against federal immigration enforcement. These policies have been used successfully in the past: In 2017, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s attempt to withdraw federal grant funding from San Francisco and Santa Clara over their sanctuary city policies was unconstitutional.
But some of those efforts may be undermined by so-called fusion centers, including one located in the Bay Area. These centers exist to allow federal agencies and local police to share data, strategy, and technology with one another, under the guise of hunting terrorism and other serious crimes.
A November report by the advocacy group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, or STOP, highlights the history and potential harms of fusion centers, with insights into the Northern California facility, which operates out of San Mateo. The report builds upon the work of the Northern California ACLU and a crucial hacked leak in 2021 that revealed internal communications and operations in fusion centers around the country.
The Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, as the Bay’s fusion center is formally titled, gathers local data from police use of license plate readers, facial recognition tech, social media, drone operations, and “Suspicious Activity Reports” on individuals. Per a 2022 investigation by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the San Francisco Police Department has acknowledged explicitly that it shares data with the fusion center. The NCRIC also provides training for SFPD, although it does not specify the scope.
At the same time, the 2022 report noted that SFPD does not have a formal agreement in the books to work with the fusion center, raising questions about transparency and oversight — or the lack thereof.
“The [Northern California fusion center] isn’t just investigating people accused of small crimes — they’re investigating people who are engaging in constitutionally protected activity, like protests,” Eleni Manis, research director at STOP, told Gazetteer SF. “That includes protests around immigration policy or ICE. The other thing to note is that the Northern California fusion center handles police requests to search ICE’s [data analysis system], which is used to find pretexts for deporting people.”
(The NCRIC did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Across the country, the federal Department of Homeland Security spends more than $400 million a year to gather local intelligence at fusion centers. The collaborative centers allow ICE to operate in jurisdictions that ban local police from sharing surveillance data with the feds, which critics say is a violation of sanctuary city laws, such as the ones in Oakland and San Francisco.
In return, local police who work with fusion centers get access to both federal funding and resources for solving their own cases. Local cops can send requests to, for instance, use ICE agents — and resources — to gather evidence on suspects they’ve been unable to bring charges against, especially on lower-level crimes like drug possession, Manis noted.
But California’s SB54 specifically prohibits police from sharing information with immigration authorities, except in cases where people have been accused of serious crimes, according to Caitlin Patler, an associate professor of public policy at UC Berkeley.
Fusion centers are the product of the post-9/11 landscape, the first one opening in 2004 amid the rise of Homeland Security and a major increase in coordination between law enforcement agencies. But a 2012 audit by the U.S. Senate found fusion centers to be in disarray, spending millions with little results to show.
“There hasn’t been a public audit since,” Manis said, despite the growing repository of data and granting of surveillance tools to local police.
This is especially problematic given that so many deportations are enabled by local authorities, sometimes with little knowledge by legislators.
“The mass deportation system in the U.S. is enabled in large part by collaboration with local law enforcement. The high-profile raids on workplaces and communities that we hear about in the news are actually a smaller portion of arrests,” Patler said. “ICE, as an agency, doesn’t make most of the arrests on its own. Most of its ability to apprehend immigrants at mass scale happens through local collaboration.”
Nicole Ozer, the tech and civil liberties directors for the Northern California ACLU, told Gazetteer that citizens need to be more aware than ever of police surveillance in communities, given this track record of personal information being sent to federal authorities. She agrees with the STOP report’s conclusion that local law enforcement should withdraw from partnerships with fusion centers outright, before the new administration can harness the data sharing possibilities for their own ends.
“This information sharing is very opaque, but SF is in a position to make sure that information is not flowing to Trump,” Ozer said. “San Francisco, and any other city, can create a firewall and clearly state that information collected in SF stays in SF.”
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