On November 21, 2023, field intelligence officers within the Department of Homeland Security quietly deleted a large set of records from the Chicago Police Department. This wasn’t a typical data cleanup.
For seven months, the information—concerning about 900 residents from the Chicagoland area—remained on a federal server, despite a deletion order from an intelligence oversight group. A subsequent investigation found nearly 800 files had been retained, violating rules meant to prevent domestic intelligence operations from targeting U.S. citizens. These records stemmed from a collaboration between DHS analysts and the Chicago police, intended to test whether local intelligence could assist federal watchlists. The idea was to determine if street-level data could identify undocumented gang members at airports and border crossings. However, the initiative failed due to what government reports term mismanagement and oversight issues.
Internal memos examined by WIRED reveal that a field officer in the DHS’s Office of Intelligence & Analysis (I&A) first requested the dataset in summer 2021. By that time, Chicago’s gang data was notorious for inaccuracies. City inspectors had warned that police could not guarantee its reliability. The records included bizarre entries, such as individuals supposedly born before 1901 and infants. Some were labeled as gang members without any ties to specific groups.
Police even displayed disdain in their data, categorizing people’s professions as “SCUM BAG,” “TURD,” or simply “BLACK.” There was no need for an arrest or conviction to be placed on the list. Prosecutors and police used these designations during legal proceedings, affecting defendants during bail hearings and sentencing. For immigrants, these labels carried additional consequences. Although Chicago had sanctuary laws that limited data sharing with immigration officers, a loophole for “known gang members” allowed for exploitation. Over a decade, immigration officials accessed this database over 32,000 times, according to records.
The I&A memos, initially retrieved by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU through a public records request, demonstrate how a limited data-sharing project within DHS devolved into a series of procedural failures. The request for data from Chicagoland went through multiple reviews without clear accountability, leading to overlooked legal protections. By the time the data reached I&A’s server around April 2022, the field officer who initiated the transfer had already departed. The project ultimately fell apart under its own bureaucratic weight. Signatures went unrecorded, audits were neglected, and the deletion deadline passed without notice. The safeguards intended to direct intelligence efforts outward—toward foreign threats rather than Americans—simply failed.
Confronted with these issues, I&A decided to terminate the project in November 2023, deleting the dataset and documenting the breach in a formal report. Spencer Reynolds, a senior counsel at the Brennan Center, states that this incident shows how federal intelligence officers can bypass local sanctuary laws. “This intelligence office is a workaround to so-called sanctuary protections that limit cities like Chicago from direct cooperation with ICE,” he explains. “Federal intelligence officers can access the data, package it up, and then hand it off to immigration enforcement, evading important policies that protect residents.”
