The Department of Homeland Security violated federal surveillance rules by keeping Chicago police gang records on nearly 800 residents for seven months past their deletion deadline. The breach exposed how federal agencies can circumvent local sanctuary protections while testing ways to feed local intelligence into national watchlists, raising concerns about domestic surveillance overreach.
Federal intelligence officers at the Department of Homeland Security quietly deleted a cache of Chicago police records on November 21, 2023 - but it wasn't routine housekeeping. For seven months, the data had sat on government servers in direct violation of federal rules designed to prevent domestic spying on Americans.
The violation centered on records from roughly 900 Chicago residents that DHS's Office of Intelligence & Analysis had requested in 2021 as part of an experiment. The goal was ambitious: test whether local gang intelligence could help federal agents spot undocumented immigrants at airports and border crossings. Instead, the project collapsed into what internal reports describe as a "cascade of procedural lapses."
Internal memos obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice reveal the scope of the compliance failure. DHS analysts had requested bulk access to Chicago's gang database - a system city inspectors had already flagged as riddled with errors and bias. Police records included people supposedly born before 1901, others listed as infants, and occupations recorded as "SCUM BAG," "TURD," or simply "BLACK."
The experiment began in June 2021 when the FBI expanded its Transnational Organized Crime Actor Detection Program to include the Latin Kings, a Chicago street gang. Spurred by this decision, a DHS field officer contacted Chicago PD officials requesting a "bulk extract" of gang records to "fully exploit the list," according to the documents.
But the project immediately hit bureaucratic turbulence. The field officer who initiated the transfer left their post in January 2022, creating what officials later called a "serious staffing gap." Their replacement wouldn't arrive for eight months, leaving the project orphaned as it moved through review layers.
By April 2022, when DHS's Data Access Review Council finally approved the transfer, basic safeguards had already broken down. The agreement required deletion of all US-person data within a year and regular compliance reports. Neither happened. Even the signature process went sideways - instead of the required undersecretary approval, the office's chief information officer signed off for reasons investigators later said "are unclear."
The Chicago data itself was a surveillance nightmare. City auditors had documented at least 18 different systems where gang information lived, with police unable to "definitively account for all such information." More than 500 outside agencies had queried these systems over a million times in a decade. Ninety-five percent of those flagged were Black or Latino, with no process for appeals and no routine purges for people who'd left gangs or gone years without police contact.
