FOI puts spotlight on stealth searches
Given that it was named by the American Society of News Editors, “Sunshine Week” has always been a weak headline. It sounds more like a 1970s block of children’s television programming than what it really is, a grave reminder of the perils of government secrecy.
It is celebrated in mid-March to honor the birth of James Madison, the Father of the Constitution. Our fourth president had no way to foresee how technology would twist government transparency into something of a Gordian knot.
Sunshine Week is elevated this year by ramifications of a Freedom of Information request filed in California by the American Civil Liberties Union. The resulting documents reveal how 9,200 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents use a license plate reader database to track immigrants.
Surveillance cameras mean we leave a trail of bread crumbs that remain in databases for years. One more thing to add to the great Connecticut toll debate of 2019: Cameras every few miles would be an ICE agent’s dream.
If you’re on board with ICE deserving every available tool to hunt immigrants, you will likely tune out the outrage of groups such as the ACLU.
But consider the nuances. The documents obtained through FOI indicate eight law enforcement agencies in Connecticut assist ICE agents by providing locations of residents through the program.
That includes police in Norwalk, Fairfield, Westport, Stratford, Trumbull, Enfield and Wethersfield, as well as security at Southern Connecticut State University.
Norwalk Mayor Harry Rilling — notably the city’s former police chief — released a joint statement with current Chief Thomas Kulhawik denying cooperation with ICE, explaining that the information was tapped through a cloud-based program police database. As if that’s reassuring. “It is the express policy of the Norwalk Police Department to refrain from cooperating or assisting with federal immigration actions,” they added.
Police departments have to tread carefully, as they could be in violation of Connecticut’s TRUST Act, created six years ago to limit cooperation with ICE. In Hartford, there are dueling proposals related to TRUST. A Republican pitch seeks to repeal the act; Democrats want to beef it up.
“We are not ICE and we have no interest in doing their work,” New Haven Assistant Police Chief Luis Casanova said at the state Capitol last week. “We need to institute strong protections to protect all of our community members. If we don’t, decades of trust-building will be eroded by the actions of a few overzealous law enforcement entities.”
In the spirit of Sunshine Week, this discourse needs to be as open and candid as possible and probe several vexing issues.
There needs to be a deeper audit of the findings. The role of Southern Connecticut State University alone calls for further scrutiny. ICE may have crossed boundaries it set for itself. In some cases, violations may have occurred in sanctuary cities.
Without FOI, we could be left in the darkness, even as all of our movements are tracked.
Surveillance cameras mean we leave a trail of bread crumbs that remain in databases for years. One more thing to add to the great Connecticut toll debate of 2019: Cameras every few miles would be an ICE agent’s dream.