DHS Kept Chicago Police Records for Months in Violation of Domestic Espionage Rules
November 21 In 2023, Department of Homeland Security field intelligence agents quietly deleted a trove of Chicago Police Department files. This was not a routine purge.
For seven months, the data — records that had been requested on about 900 Chicagoland residents — remained on a federal server, in violation of a deletion order issued by an intelligence watchdog agency. A subsequent investigation found that nearly 800 records had been kept, which a later report said violated rules designed to prevent domestic intelligence operations from targeting legal residents of the United States. The recordings come from a private exchange between DHS analysts and Chicago police, a test of how local intelligence could feed the federal government’s watch lists. The idea was to see if data collected at street level could reveal undocumented gang members in lines at airports and border crossings. The experiment collapsed amid what government reports describe as a chain of mismanagement and oversight failures.
Internal memos reviewed by WIRED reveal that the dataset was first requested by a DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) field agent in the summer of 2021. At that time, Chicago gang data was already known to be riddled with contradictions and errors. Municipal inspectors had warned that the police could not guarantee the accuracy of the information. The entries created by police included people allegedly born before 1901 and others who appeared to be infants. Some were described by police as gang members but were not linked to any particular group.
Police incorporated their own contempt into the data, listing people’s occupations as “SCUM BAG,” “TURD” or simply “BLACK.” Neither arrest nor conviction was necessary to be included on the list.
Prosecutors and police have relied on designations of suspected gang members in their cases and investigations. They followed defendants through bail hearings and sentencing. For immigrants, this carried additional weight. Chicago’s sanctuary rules prohibited most data sharing with immigration agents, but an exclusion at the time for “known gang members” left a backdoor open. Over the course of a decade, immigration officials searched the database more than 32,000 times, records show.
The I&A memos — first obtained by NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice through a public records request — show that what began within DHS as a limited experiment in data sharing appears to have quickly spiraled into a cascade of procedural lapses. The request for Chicagoland data has gone through multiple levels of review without a clear owner, its legal safeguards overlooked or ignored. When the data landed on I&A’s server around April 2022, the field agent who initiated the transfer had left his position. The experiment ultimately collapsed under its own red tape. Signatures went missing, audits were never filed, and the removal deadline went unnoticed. The safeguards meant to keep intelligence work focused outward — toward foreign threats, not Americans — have simply failed.
Faced with this failure, I&A ultimately abandoned the project in November 2023, erasing the dataset and commemorating the breach in a formal report.
Spencer Reynolds, senior counsel at the Brennan Center, says the episode illustrates how federal intelligence agents can circumvent local 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 agents can access the data, aggregate it, and then transmit it to immigration agencies, circumventing important policies intended to protect residents.”
