Law enforcement across the U.S. are sifting through a Louisville Metro Police Department database of vehicles captured by the city’s growing fleet of license plate reader cameras.
The reason: Immigration enforcement.
The nationwide practice, first revealed by 404 Media, worries civil liberty advocates, congressional lawmakers and digital privacy experts who say the sprawling network of data creates a perverse dragnet that undermines the advertised intent of the controversial license plate reader cameras.
But the tactic is gaining traction as President Donald Trump pushes an aggressive, anti-immigrant agenda focused on deporting millions of people.
In Louisville, the practice could also violate local law.
LMPD started paying for license plate reader cameras made by a company called Flock Safety beginning as early as 2021, according to records obtained by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting. The department refuses to say where the cameras are located. Officials tout the cameras as a tool to help find missing people and address other issues like stolen cars, street racing and violence.
Flock Safety lets law enforcement agencies share access to the data their cameras collect. Its national license plate reader network totals over 20 billion license plate “reads” per month across more than 5,000 communities.
Regular audits maintained by each police agency document every time their license plate reader data is searched, who does it and the reason given for the search. KyCIR obtained LMPD’s audits between March 2022 and July 2025.
In just the first half of 2025, LMPD’s Flock network was pinged about 1,700 times by officials from law enforcement agencies in more than a dozen states who listed immigration-related keywords as the reason for their searches. One LMPD officer conducted 150 of the searches, according to the data.
The number of searches this year amount to a 123% increase compared with the three years prior, when former President Joe Biden was in charge.
The audits obtained by KyCIR don’t have much detail — oftentimes listing just one word as the reason for the search and providing little information about individual cases. The audits don’t detail search outcomes, making it impossible to verify what or who police were searching for.
But the audits offer a window into how police have broad access to a national surveillance database that few residents know about.
Using LMPD’s data to assist federal immigration enforcement could hurt the beleaguered agency’s ability to build trust with the city’s growing immigrant communities, said Amber Duke, executive director of the ACLU of Kentucky.
“When, ultimately, we are putting so much trust in the good intention of other folks that we don’t know, this creates an environment that is ripe for potential abuse,” Duke said.
She also wonders if the practice aligns with a local law that limits how LMPD can assist federal immigration officials. With limited exceptions, the 2017 city ordinance bans local police from questioning, arresting or detaining people for violating civil immigration laws or from undertaking “any law enforcement action…for the purpose of detecting the presence of undocumented persons.”
“LMPD is not to be in the business of collaborating with federal immigration officials,” Duke told KyCIR. “I think I would say a lot more information is needed here.”
LMPD declined KyCIR’s requests to interview police officials who manage the city’s Flock Safety system. In an email, LMPD spokesperson Sgt. Matt Sanders said the agency does not engage in immigration enforcement.
KyCIR obtained audits of LMPD’s Flock database through public records requests. Our analysis identified searches that used keywords like “immigration,” “ICE,” and “ERO.”
ICE is an acronym for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency leading Trump’s mass deportation operation. ERO is an acronym for Enforcement and Removal Operations, a unit within ICE that manages immigration enforcement, including arresting and deporting people who aren’t legally authorized to live in the country.
It’s possible a search that used a seemingly immigration-related keyword might be for something completely different. For example, Captain Bryce Whitener from the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia told KyCIR that when they listed “ICE” as the reason for searches, they were actually referring to their “Interstate Criminal Enforcement” unit – not the federal immigration agency. We excluded Lowndes County from our analysis.
LMPD officer searches under review
Just after 11 a.m. on Feb. 28, LMPD Officer Wesley Troutman ran a search of Louisville’s license plate data and listed “Immigration” as the reason.
Over the next two weeks, he listed “Immigration” as the reason for 26 more searches. He also ran 123 searches where he listed the reason as “ERO” – the acronym used by ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations.
He filed his last searches at 4:19 a.m. and 4:20 a.m. on March 13.
Under Trump, ICE has conducted raids in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles. Louisville hasn’t seen that degree of ICE activity, but federal agents have done immigration enforcement here this year.
On March 14, the day after Troutman ran his final immigration-related database search, federal officials announced they had arrested 81 immigrants as part of Trump’s “Operation Take Back America.” The Kentucky operation, “coordinated out of Louisville,” was conducted during the week of March 10 to 14.
Sanders, LMPD’s spokesperson, said Troutman’s searches that used the keyword “Immigration” were actually related “to criminal activity, not immigration status.” Sanders said department officials reviewed the searches and “found no evidence of misuse.”
Asked about Troutman’s searches tagged as “ERO,” Sanders said “LMPD policy prohibits officers from engaging in civil immigration-related enforcement activities. We are currently reviewing this matter.”
LMPD didn’t provide details on what Troutman was investigating. Officers can list a case number when they search the Flock network, but the audits show Troutman left that field blank.
KyCIR requested any citations or case files that include information obtained from Troutman’s searches tagged as “Immigration,” as well as any files downloaded from LMPD’s Flock database from those searches. The police department said no public records were found.
LMPD declined KyCIR’s request to interview Troutman.
At the same time federal officials were carrying out the mass immigration arrests in Kentucky earlier this year, an agency listed as “ATF Louisville KY” made 120 searches in LMPD’s Flock data using immigration-related keywords — mostly “ERO.”
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, known as the ATF, has a Louisville field office that took part in the mass immigration enforcement operation in March, according to the announcement from federal officials.
Special Agent Bradley Brown of the ATF Louisville Field Division said via email that the agency couldn’t respond to KyCIR’s request for comment about these searches because of the federal government shutdown.
Does it violate local law?
This summer, Mayor Craig Greenberg agreed to keep people locked up in the city jail for two more days beyond when they’re scheduled to be freed if federal agents claim they’re living here illegally and want to detain them. Greenberg faced a threatened lawsuit by the Trump administration and said he was trying to keep Louisville from becoming a target for mass immigration raids.
The mayor’s move chipped away at the city's “separation ordinance” that limits LMPD’s cooperation with ICE, said Louisville Metro Council Member JP Lyninger, a District 6 Democrat. He also thinks LMPD’s deployment of the Flock license plate reader network runs afoul of that local law.
“Some of these [findings by KyCIR] sound like blatant violations of our separation ordinance, where the city of Louisville has said that we are not going to use our resources for enforcement of immigration,” Lyninger said.
But Louisville Metro Council Member Anthony Piagentini, a District 19 Republican and minority caucus chair, said he doesn’t think it violates the ordinance if LMPD’s license plate data is used indirectly, by outside agencies, to help ICE.
He sees the ordinance as aiming to prevent LMPD officers from spending their time helping ICE instead of on local policing.
“And I think the intention was more related to officer time than technology,” he said. “Versus saying, ‘Yeah, you can have access to that piece of technology.’ That doesn't cost us anything, right? It's just, you know, sort of what I would call standard interdepartmental cooperation.”
Josh Abner, spokesperson for Jefferson County Attorney Mike O’Connell, declined to discuss whether LMPD’s use of the Flock license plate reader network could violate the ordinance. He said the county attorney provides Metro Government with legal representation and, as such, does not provide legal analysis to the public.
Greenberg’s spokesperson, Matt Mudd, said via email that LMPD hasn’t accessed or used license plate reader data “in a way that violates LMPD’s policy to not assist with federal immigration enforcement.”
“The term ‘immigration’ has been used in the past for queries for large-scale cartel drug trafficking and importing investigations, so it would not be an accurate way to determine if the tool is being used in a way that violates LMPD's policy,” Mudd said.
Mudd said LMPD did remove “immigration” as a term officers can use as a “search query” for its license plate data “to avoid any confusion.”
“LMPD has not, is not, and will not assist ICE with immigration enforcement,” he said.
Blocking individual search terms is one of the software changes Flock has announced since 404 Media reported on immigration and abortion-related searches of Flock data.
“We recently launched Keyword Filters, which automatically block searches involving impermissible terms, such as “immigration” or “abortion”, for jurisdictions in states that have specific legal restrictions or agencies whose policies prohibit such searches,” a Flock spokesperson told KyCIR via email. “Next month, we are introducing a mandatory Offense Type dropdown, which requires every search to align with a specific offense or investigative purpose, creating a stronger audit trail.”
Civil liberties advocates say it’s a losing game to try to control how individual law enforcement officials use this tech.
License plate reader technology has existed in some form for around 50 years, and numerous attempts to put guardrails around its use have failed, said Sarah Hamid, associate director of activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“That’s because the pathways to this data being used for immigration enforcement are about as convoluted as the system itself, right?” she said. “There are so many different pathways, and there's so many different holes that are so difficult to plug.”
A look at outside agencies
Of the roughly 1,700 searches that law enforcement ran on LMPD’s license plate database in the first half of 2025, one agency – Florida Highway Patrol – made about 22% of those inquiries.
The agency didn’t respond to KyCIR’s requests for comment. The news outlet Suncoast Searchlight found a lot of Florida Highway Patrol’s immigration-related searches happened around the time of an immigration operation in the Sunshine State that arrested over 1,100 people.
Other top searchers that filed over 100 searches using immigration-related keywords were the Houston Police Department and Texas Department of Public Safety in the Lonestar State, the Richmond Police Department in Virginia, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office in Florida and ATF Louisville. The Texas agencies didn’t respond to KyCIR’s requests for comment.
Jacksonville sheriff spokesperson Vic Micolucci said via email: “We at times do assist other partners with investigations.”
Micolucci said their searches are “of systems nationwide.” And the Jacksonville sheriff isn’t alone in that.
Overall, the Louisville audits indicate LMPD was just one of thousands of license plate reader databases collectively searched, all at once, by law enforcement for immigration-related reasons.
For example, many searches sifted through more than 6,000 Flock networks, featuring data collected by over 80,000 cameras.
The Flock audits don’t say if a specific search resulted in an arrest, so it’s unclear if any of the immigration-related searches that pinged LMPD’s database actually led to someone being detained for deportation.
Outside agencies made fewer immigration-related searches of LMPD’s Flock network when former President Joe Biden was in charge.
Flock audits for 2022 through 2024 show around 750 searches that mention keywords like “ICE,” “ERO,” or “immigration.” About 75% of the searches came from just one agency, the Hoover Police Department in Alabama.
Recent reporting, first by 404 Media and later by other news outlets, as well as public statements by various law enforcement agencies, indicate some state and local officers have helped federal agents by running Flock searches as a favor or by giving agents direct access to their data.
In Virginia, for example, the Richmond Police Department said in July that a now-former employee gave an ATF analyst access to their Flock network.
The department said the analyst “made queries for immigration enforcement in violation” of the local police’s operational standards. An ATF special agent said the analyst’s searches concerned criminal activity, not civil immigration enforcement. Richmond revoked the analyst’s access.
Mudd, the spokesperson for Louisville’s mayor, said, “If LMPD learns of any indication that access is being used by outside agencies in a way that violates LMPD's policy, the access can and would be revoked.”
Local police also may work directly with federal agents on a task force and run Flock searches as part of those duties. In Louisville, for example, LMPD spokesperson Sanders said Officer Michael Williams works on a Homeland Security task force.
Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, operates within ICE but its mission includes investigating transnational crimes like human trafficking and drug smuggling. Williams made four searches on the city’s Flock database in April that listed “HSI” as the reason, which Sanders said “falls squarely within his duties as a task force officer.”
When KyCIR analyzed Louisville’s 2025 Flock audits, it excluded nearly 4,000 searches that used the keyword “HSI” because such searches could be related to criminal investigations that go beyond whether someone is legally allowed to live in the U.S.
Flock also has supplied its services directly to federal agencies, the company’s CEO, Garrett Langley, recently confirmed. He said they did “limited pilots” with HSI and U.S. Customs and Border Protection to help fight “human trafficking and fentanyl distribution.”
Langley said Flock paused “all ongoing federal pilots” in August but indicated the company still plans to work directly with federal law enforcement agencies. The company’s announcement came after Colorado news outlet 9NEWS revealed Customs and Border Protection’s use of Flock tech.
Langley said in a June blog post that individual law enforcement agencies decide how they use Flock’s technology, including who they share their data with and whether to help federal agents.
Many agencies work with federal authorities on criminal cases unrelated to civil immigration enforcement, Langley said. Some help with immigration enforcement, while in other jurisdictions it’s either illegal to do so under state law or “considered socially unacceptable.”
“The point is: it is a local decision,” Langley said. “Not my decision, and not Flock’s decision.”
