Lawmakers warn Democratic governors that states share driver data with ICE

A group of Democratic lawmakers sent letters to several state governors, including Arizona, California, Colorado and Wisconsin, warning that their states are inadvertently sharing driver data with federal immigration authorities.

messagewhich was First reported by Reuterstold governors that their states provide U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies with “frictionless, self-service access to the personal data of all your residents,” through a nonprofit organization run by state police agencies called the National Law Enforcement Communications System, or Nlets.

Nlets facilitates the sharing of state residents’ personal data, in this case driver’s license data, between state, local and federal police agencies.

The lawmakers asked the group of governors to stop the practice and block access to ICE and “other federal agencies that now act as Trump’s shock troops.”

ICE and Nlets did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

For two decades, most states have made their population data, such as driver’s licenses and other information from each state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) database, available for search and retrieval to approximately 18,000 federal and local law enforcement agencies across the United States and Canada. This practice allows those agencies to directly access population data without the knowledge or involvement of any state employee, according to the letter.

The letter said it was possible that ICE could use driver’s license photos for a facial recognition app called Mobile Fortify, which agents use to identify people on the street and relies on 200 million photos.

According to the letter, Nlets has facilitated “more than 290 million DMV data inquiries,” with more than 290,000 ICE inquiries and approximately 600,000 Homeland Security investigations during the year prior to October 1, 2025.

“It is now abundantly clear that the main reason why so few countries lock down the data they share through Nlets is because there is an information gap,” the letter said. “Due to the technical complexity of the Nlets system, few state government officials understand how their state shares their population data with federal and out-of-state agencies,” the letter said.

Blocking “unfettered access” to agencies would not prevent federal agencies from obtaining information from states to solve serious crimes, the letter said, but taking action would “increase accountability and reduce abuses” by allowing state employees to review data requests first.

The lawmakers noted that some states, including Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Washington, have recently restricted the type of data ICE can access via Nlets, and reminded governors that it is up to them to stop the practice at any time.