On 21st November, 2023, field intelligence officers from the Department of Homeland Security quietly deleted numerous Chicago Police Department records. This was not a routine purification.
For seven months, the data—records that were requested on approximately 900 Chicagoland residents—existed on a federal server in violation of a deletion order issued by an intelligence oversight body. A subsequent investigation found that approximately 800 files had been kept, leading to a report that rules designed to prevent domestic intelligence operations from targeting legal US residents were violated. These records originated in a private exchange between DHS analysts and Chicago police, a test of how local intelligence could influence the federal government’s watchlist. The idea was to see if street-level data could uncover undocumented gang members in airport queues and border crossings. The experiment failed amid what government reports described as a series of mismanagement and oversight failures.
Internal memos reviewed by WIRED show that the dataset was first requested in the summer of 2021 by a field officer in DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A). By then, Chicago’s gang data was already notorious for being full of contradictions and errors. City inspectors warned that police could not guarantee its accuracy. The entries made by the police reportedly included people born before 1901 and others who appeared to be infants. Some were labeled by police as gang members but were not associated with any particular group.
The police channeled their contempt into the data, listing people’s occupations as “scum bags,” “turds,” or simply “blacks.” Neither arrest nor conviction was necessary to make the list.
Prosecutors and police relied on the designations of alleged gang members in their filings and investigations. He assisted defendants in bail hearings and sentencing. For immigrants, this carried additional burden. Chicago’s sanctuary rules prohibited sharing most data with immigration officials, but a separate door was left open for “known gang members” at the time. Records show that over the course of a decade, immigration officials used the database more than 32,000 times.
The I&A memo, first obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU through a public records request, shows that what started as a limited data-sharing experiment inside DHS quickly turned into a litany of procedural loopholes. The request for the Chicagoland data went through layers of review without a clear owner, bypassing its legal safeguards. By the time the data arrived on I&A’s servers around April 2022, the field officer who initiated the transfer had left his post. This experiment ultimately collapsed under its own paperwork. Signatures went missing, audits were never filed and deletion deadlines went unnoticed. The guardrails designed to keep intelligence work outward – toward foreign threats, not toward Americans – simply failed.
Faced with the lapse, I&A ultimately ended the project in November 2023 by erasing the dataset and recalling the breach in a formal report.
Spencer Reynolds, a senior attorney at the Brennan Center, says the episode shows how federal intelligence officers can circumvent local sanctuary laws. “This intelligence office is a solution to so-called sanctuary protections that limit cities like Chicago from direct cooperation with ICE,” he says. “Federal intelligence officials can access the data, package it, and then turn it over to immigration enforcement while bypassing important policies meant to protect residents.”