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On November 21, In 2023, field intelligence officers within the Department of Homeland Security quietly deleted a trove of Chicago Police Department records. It was not a routine disinfection.
For seven months, the data — records requested on nearly 900 Chicagoland residents — were kept on a federal server in violation of a deletion order issued by the intelligence watchdog. A subsequent investigation found that nearly 800 files were kept, which a subsequent report said violated rules designed to prevent domestic intelligence operations from targeting legal residents of the United States. The records originated in a private exchange between Department of Homeland Security analysts and Chicago police, a test of how domestic intelligence feeds into federal government watch lists. The idea was to see if street-level data could show undocumented gang members in airport lines and at border crossings. The experiment collapsed amid what government reports describe as a series of mismanagement and oversight failures.
Internal memos reviewed by WIRED reveal that the data set was first requested by a field employee in DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) in the summer of 2021. By then, Chicago gang data was already notorious for being illegal. Full of contradictions and errors. City inspectors warned that police cannot guarantee its accuracy. The entries created by the police included people allegedly born before 1901 and others who appeared to be children. Police classified some of them as gang members, but they were not associated with any particular group.
Police hid their disdain in the data, listing people’s occupations as “scum bag”, “TURD” or simply “black”. Neither arrest nor conviction was necessary to compile the list.
Prosecutors and police relied on the designations of alleged gang members in their files and investigations. They tracked defendants through bail hearings and all the way to sentencing. For immigrants, it carried extra weight. Chicago’s sanctuary rules prevented most data from being shared with immigration officers, but an exception at the time for “known gang members” left a back door open. Over the course of a decade, immigration officers used the database more than 32,000 times, records show.
The I&A memos — first obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU through a public records request — show that what began within DHS as a limited data-sharing experiment appears to have quickly turned into a series of procedural lapses. The Chicagoland data request went through layers of review without a clear owner, and its legal safeguards were overlooked or ignored. By the time the data reached the I&A server around April 2022, the field official who initiated the transfer had left his position. The experiment eventually collapsed under its own papers. Signatures were lost, audits were never submitted, and the deletion deadline slipped unnoticed. The guardrails intended to keep intelligence work directed outward — toward foreign threats, not Americans — have simply failed.
Faced with this lapse, I&A eventually halted the project in November 2023, deleted the dataset and cited the breach in an official report.
Spencer Reynolds, a senior adviser at the Brennan Center, says the incident illustrates how federal intelligence officers can skirt domestic sanctuary laws. “This intelligence office is a workaround to so-called sanctuary protections that prevent cities like Chicago from directly cooperating with ICE,” he says. “Federal intelligence officers can access data, compile it, then turn it over to immigration enforcement, evading policies important to protecting populations.”