November 21, In 2023, Department of Homeland Security field intelligence officers quietly deleted numerous Chicago Police Department records. This was no ordinary cleaning.
For seven months, the data (records that were requested on approximately 900 Chicago residents) was stored on a federal server in violation of a deletion order issued by the intelligence watchdog. A later investigation found that about 800 files had been retained, which a subsequent report said violated rules designed to prevent domestic intelligence operations from targeting legal U.S. residents. The recordings emerged from private exchanges between DHS analysts and Chicago police to test how local intelligence could feed federal government watch lists. The idea was to see if street data could identify illegal gang members in queues at airports and border crossings. The experiment failed due to what government reports describe as a chain of management and oversight failures.
Internal memos reviewed by WIRED show the data set was first requested by a DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) field officer in the summer of 2021. By that time, Chicago gang data was already known for being full of contradictions and mistakes. City inspectors warned that police could not vouch for its accuracy. The records created by the police included people believed to have been born before 1901, as well as others who appeared to be infants. Some were described by police as gang members, but they were not affiliated with any specific group.
The police included their own disdain in this data, listing people's professions as “POOP BAGS”, “POOP” or simply “BLACKS”. No arrest or conviction was required to be included on this list.
Prosecutors and police relied on the names of alleged gang members in their cases and investigations. They monitored defendants at bail hearings and sentencing. For immigrants, this carried additional weight. Chicago's asylum rules prohibited sharing most data with immigration officials, but the then-ban on “known gang members” left the back door open. Immigration officers accessed the database more than 32,000 times over a decade, records show.
The I&A memos, first obtained by New York University'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 soon devolved into a cascade of procedural errors. The Chicagoland data request went through multiple rounds of review without a clear owner, and its legal safeguards were overlooked or ignored. By the time the data reached the I&A server around April 2022, the field officer who initiated the transfer had already left his post. The experiment ultimately failed due to its own paperwork. Signatures disappeared, checks were never completed, and the deletion deadline flew by. Guardrails designed to direct intelligence work outward—toward foreign threats rather than Americans—have simply failed.
Faced with the omission, I&A ultimately shut down the project in November 2023, destroying the data set and memorializing the violation in an official 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 agency is a workaround for the so-called sanctuary defense that limits cities like Chicago from working directly with ICE,” he says. “Federal intelligence officers could access the data, package it, and then turn it over to immigration authorities, evading important policies to protect residents.”
