KVIG Informative

Las Vegas police say their license plate cameras exist to catch car thieves. Built into the same system is a federal watchlist that can flag a car for immigration enforcement instead.

Flock Safety’s camera system includes a built-in feature allowing local law enforcement agencies to subscribe to specific FBI National Crime Information Center watchlists, one of which is labeled “Immigration Violator,” according to the nonprofit digital rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation, which confirmed the feature’s existence in June.

Flock told the organization that the FBI curates the immigration watchlist itself and pushes it out to subscribing local agencies, and that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not see the resulting plate alerts directly once they leave the FBI’s system.

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LVMPD and ICE signed a 287(g) agreement in 2025, a formal arrangement that allows Metro officers to execute immigration warrants on people already held at the Clark County Detention Center. The agreement also permits people to be held for up to an additional 48 hours past their scheduled release time specifically so ICE can take them into custody.

ACLU of Nevada Executive Director Athar Haseebullah said Flock’s technology poses a heightened risk not just for immigrants, but for anyone engaged in conduct that could later be characterized as politically defiant. He pointed to a case in Texas in which police used Flock technology to conduct a nationwide search for a woman who had self-induced an abortion.

Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s national office who focuses on surveillance technology, described the lack of public discussion before LVMPD’s system was built as a short circuit of the democratic process.

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Nevada has no state law prohibiting license plate data collected by local police from being shared with or accessed by federal immigration authorities, and no bill addressing the issue was introduced during the state’s most recent legislative session.

The cameras were sold to the public, when the public was told anything at all, as a tool for catching stolen vehicles. Whether that same tool ends up deciding who gets pulled over for a broken taillight and who doesn’t isn’t a question Nevada law currently answers one way or the other.