John Oliver on police gang databases: ‘Get rid of them’

John Oliver: ‘It is pretty clear that gang databases are way too easy to get on, way too hard to get off, and can turn people’s lives upside down.’ Photograph: YouTube

After an extended summer holiday, John Oliver returned to his desk at Last Week Tonight to dissect US law enforcement’s overreliance on faulty and unregulated gang databases. Such databases – as Oliver put it, “basically lists the police keep of people they say are involved in gangs” – have been used to justify numerous deportations under the Trump administration, including the deportation and detention of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Salvadorian immigrant from Maryland whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) illegally deported due to what they later admitted was an “administrative error”.