A Missouri Republican who chairs a Senate Judiciary subcommittee has opened a formal investigation into Flock Safety, the company whose AI-powered license plate cameras now blanket most of the country. Sen. Josh Hawley's demand for internal company records, sent Aug. 26, lands amid a rare left-right convergence of anger at the firm — and, for Latino families in the five metro areas LatinTimes covers most closely, the fight is no longer abstract. Local reporting over the past year has repeatedly tied Flock's camera network to federal immigration enforcement, from Illinois to Texas to Florida.
What Hawley's Letter Demands
Hawley chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, and in that capacity sent Flock CEO Garrett Langley a letter demanding a full accounting of how the company collects, stores and shares the data its cameras generate. His office puts Flock's current footprint at more than 120,000 cameras spread across 49 states, scanning roughly 20 billion vehicles a month. Hawley wants Langley to disclose every confirmed case of employee or customer misuse dating back to Jan. 1, 2021, along with the exact justification a police officer must type in before running a search. "Congress never authorized the network your industry has built," Hawley wrote, giving the company until Sept. 8 to comply. A Flock spokesperson told reporters the company plans to cooperate fully with the subcommittee.
A Rare Left-Right Alliance Against the Cameras
Hawley's probe didn't emerge in isolation. Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders used the same Wednesday to announce, in a lengthy social media post, that he intends to write legislation reining in the company, warning "stop flock, stop AI mass surveillance" before unchecked tracking pushes the country toward a surveillance state; he has not yet released a timeline or draft text, according to Yahoo News. That pledge builds on pressure that predates Hawley's letter: back in November 2025, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden and Illinois Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi had already urged the Federal Trade Commission to examine Flock's lax account-security practices, a narrower cybersecurity complaint rather than an immigration-focused one. Even Florida's Republican governor has broken with the party line on this issue: speaking to reporters Aug. 26 at Florida International University, Ron DeSantis said "I think it's out of control," while still calling for police to retain some surveillance tools and framing the fix as a job for state lawmakers.
Where Immigration Enforcement Enters the Picture
For LatinTimes' core audience, the more consequential story sits beneath the privacy headlines. A 404 Media investigation published in May 2025, built on records that the Danville Police Department in Illinois released under a public-records request, documented more than 4,000 searches of Flock's national database between June 2024 and May 2025 in which officers listed "ICE," "immigration" or similar terms as their justification — frequently described by local departments as informal favors extended to federal agents who have no direct contract with the company. Flock maintains it has never sold or licensed data to Immigration and Customs Enforcement directly, but the company's default settings have historically let a department's search results reach far beyond the agencies that customer intended.
Illinois: A State Audit Catches a Hidden Federal Pilot
That gap became concrete in Illinois last August, when Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias's office sampled just a dozen local police agencies and discovered Flock had quietly been running a pilot program that gave U.S. Customs and Border Protection access to Illinois camera footage — a violation, his office said, of a 2023 state law barring plate-reader data from being used for immigration or abortion-related purposes. Giannoulias ordered the access shut off immediately, and Flock says it has since paused that CBP pilot nationwide, not just in Illinois. Within two weeks, the same office found a second breach: police in the Village of Forest Park had, through separate Motorola-linked technology, left a comparable opening to the same border agency.
Los Angeles Walks Away From the Table
The most visible break from Flock so far came in Los Angeles. On July 10, the LAPD's own Office of Inspector General released an audit finding that 161 of roughly 498 stolen-vehicle "hot list" alerts generated by Flock cameras over a recent two-month span turned out to be wrong, putting the system's error rate at 32.3% — meaning officers pulled over an innocent driver in nearly a third of those stops. The department's three-year agreement with Flock lapsed the very next day without renewal. Dean Gialamas, the department's chief information officer, told ABC7 Los Angeles the department was walking away over "serious concerns around civil liberties" tied chiefly to who legally owns the collected data. The LAPD has said the footage it gathered was never used to help ICE, though advocacy groups have pointed to a separate, contested report alleging the department's data reached federal immigration agents indirectly through other jurisdictions' camera networks — a dispute the department rejects. Los Angeles is now negotiating a new contract that would give the city, rather than Flock, ownership of the data.
Houston: A Fatal Shooting Deepens the Distrust
Houston's chapter of this story cannot be separated from the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. On July 7, an ICE agent shot and killed the 52-year-old, a father of three who had spent 35 years living in Houston, in the heavily Latino East End as he drove a construction crew to a job site; federal officials say he tried to ram an agent with his van, a version his passengers and family dispute. Multiple investigations — by the Harris County District Attorney, the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general and the FBI — remained open as of the most recent reporting. That killing has sharpened local wariness of the camera network Harris County agencies rely on: county commissioners voted in May to keep their cameras running under a renewed agreement with Flock into mid-2027 over resident objections, promising amendments they had not yet delivered as of a Houston Public Media report published Aug. 10. Separately, The 74's February 2026 investigation — later referenced in Texas Tribune coverage — traced a different vulnerability: federal immigration officers reached a Houston-area school district's camera footage indirectly, routed through police agencies in other states with which the district had struck its own data-sharing deals.
South Florida's Camera-Dense, Legally Unrestricted Landscape
Florida presents the starkest version of the problem described above. Unlike Illinois, the state has no law limiting how local police coordinate with federal immigration agents, and it leads the nation in active 287(g) deputization agreements that let local officers carry out immigration enforcement directly. Doral, greater Miami-Dade and neighboring cities home to significant numbers of residents with roots in Venezuela, Cuba and Central America sit inside some of the state's heaviest camera coverage, and advocates argue that overlap functions as an informal early-warning system whenever a targeted vehicle passes a reader, according to WLRN's reporting on how the issue has become a flashpoint in the state's 2026 governor's race. DeSantis's own recent criticism of Flock arrives even as his administration has aggressively expanded immigration enforcement infrastructure elsewhere in the state, an apparent tension advocates have been quick to point out.
New York and New Jersey: Retreat in One State, Expansion Fights in the Other
New York has seen the most organized rollback of any state LatinTimes covers. Ithaca's Common Council voted unanimously on March 4 to terminate its contract and remove all 22 of the city's readers, with the sponsoring alderperson arguing the technology conflicted with the city's sanctuary-city protections; Tompkins County's legislature followed with its own 12-1 vote against renewal weeks later. The village of Scarsdale ended its contract after more than 450 residents signed a petition, and towns including Saranac Lake, Poestenkill and Pine Plains have taken similar steps, according to tracking by the New York Civil Liberties Union. New Jersey tells a different story: cities such as Passaic and Edison already operate active Flock networks — Edison's dates back to 2022 — and are not weighing expansion so much as facing a growing push from the ACLU of New Jersey for firmer rules on who local departments can share that data with, since the state currently leaves those sharing decisions largely up to individual police chiefs.
What Happens Next
Flock has signaled it intends to answer Hawley's questions in full, and the company continues to point to figures from its own 2025 Impact Census claiming its cameras supported more than 1 million criminal investigations last year and helped locate upwards of 10,000 missing people. Whether that record satisfies the subcommittee remains to be seen once the Sept. 8 deadline arrives. What is already clear, city by city, is that the pattern documented since 2024 is unlikely to resolve on a single timeline — leaving mixed-status Latino households in Doral, Houston's East End, Chicago's suburbs and beyond to keep navigating a surveillance landscape that looks different depending on which side of a county or state line they live on.
