According to Wired, Department of Homeland Security field intelligence officers deleted Chicago Police Department records on November 21, 2023, after keeping them for seven months in violation of a deletion order. The data covered roughly 900 Chicagoland residents and was part of an experiment to test whether street-level intelligence could help identify undocumented gang members at airports and border crossings. Internal memos show the Office of Intelligence & Analysis first requested the data in summer 2021, but the experiment collapsed amid mismanagement and oversight failures. Nearly 800 files were kept past the deletion deadline, breaching rules designed to prevent domestic intelligence operations from targeting legal US residents. The data transfer occurred around April 2022, but the initiating officer had left their post, and required signatures, audits, and deletion deadlines were all missed.
Broken Data, Broken System
Here’s the thing about this Chicago gang database – it was notoriously unreliable even before DHS got involved. City inspectors had already warned that police couldn’t vouch for its accuracy. We’re talking about entries that included people supposedly born before 1901 and others who appeared to be infants. Some were labeled as gang members but not linked to any actual gang.
But the problems went way beyond just bad record-keeping. Police officers literally baked their contempt into the system, listing people’s occupations as “SCUM BAG,” “TURD,” or simply “BLACK.” And get this – neither arrest nor conviction was necessary to make the list. This is the quality of data that federal intelligence officers were trying to feed into watchlists that could affect people’s ability to travel or even remain in the country.
Sanctuary City Workaround
So why was DHS so interested in this messy local data? Spencer Reynolds from the Brennan Center nails it – this intelligence office became a workaround to Chicago’s sanctuary protections. Normally, Chicago’s rules bar most data sharing with immigration officers, but there was this carve-out for “known gang members” that left a back door open.
And immigration officers had already been tapping that database heavily – over 32,000 times in a decade, records show. The DHS experiment basically tested whether they could take this flawed local intelligence, package it up federally, and then hand it off to immigration enforcement. It’s a classic end-run around local policies designed to protect residents.
How the Guardrails Failed
What’s really concerning is how completely the system broke down. The request moved through layers of review with no clear owner, legal safeguards were overlooked, and by the time the data landed on I&A’s server, the officer who initiated the transfer had already left. Basically, everyone assumed someone else was handling it.
The guardrails meant to keep intelligence work focused outward – toward foreign threats, not Americans – just collapsed. Signatures went missing, audits never happened, and the deletion deadline slipped by completely unnoticed for seven months. This wasn’t some sophisticated evasion – it was bureaucratic incompetence on a scale that put nearly 800 people’s information at risk.
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Bigger Picture
This episode raises some uncomfortable questions. How many other “experiments” like this are happening across different agencies? And if they can’t even follow their own rules with data this problematic, what confidence can we have in their handling of more sensitive intelligence?
The fact that it took internal memos obtained through public records requests to uncover this breach suggests the oversight system isn’t working as intended. I&A ultimately killed the project and wiped the data, but only after the violation was discovered. Makes you wonder what else might be sitting on federal servers that shouldn’t be there.
