Columbus authorities keep cameras of the company that allegedly helps ICE with finding immigrants, despite the previous anti-ICE activity
Despite previously passing several measures against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, the Columbus City Council kept the city’s contract with a company that allegedly cooperates with ICE to find immigrants inside the country.
Columbus has a contract with Flock Safety for 40 artificial intelligence-powered license-plate-reading cameras installed in the city’s high-crime areas.
“City Council knows we have to do everything we can to prevent chaos on our streets that would set our community back,” Columbus President Pro Tempore Rob Dorans said during the announcement of the legislative package.
While city officials said the local police rely on these cameras to solve crimes, anti-ICE activists, including Jona Hilario, statewide co-director of OPAWL- Building AAPI Feminist Leadership, a grassroots group centered on Asian American and Pacific Islander issues, said the cameras are used by ICE and Customs and Border Protection, according to The Columbus Dispatch.
“We also urge City Council to completely cut ties with mass surveillance companies, specifically Flock Safety,” Hilario said. “There are no regulations on how Flock surveillance technology can be used by government officials, and Flock license plate reader data has ended up in the hands of ICE and CBP, who use it for immigration operations.”
The Dispatch reported that the City Council approved a contract with Flock Safety in 2024 for $228,000. A crowdsourced map on Deflock, a crowdsourced project that aims to map the locations of Flock license plate reader cameras, indicated that there are hundreds of the company’s cameras in Franklin County, including the city, its suburbs, and the Ohio State University.
Flock Safety’s spokesperson, Paris Lewbel, told The Columbus Dispatch that the Atlanta-based company doesn’t have active contracts with ICE or CBP. However, the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights and The Guardian reported that some police officers who have access to camera footage share it with federal immigration agencies to help them locate immigrants.
Columbus City Councilmember Emmanuel Remy, chair of the council’s Public Safety & Criminal Justice Committee, told the Columbus newspaper that his office continues discussing the surveillance technology with the Division of Police.
“We’ve asked the division to give us a clear accounting of what works and what doesn’t work, and Flock is one of those things (that works),” he said. “We want to make sure we’re striking a balance between public safety and the privacy of our residents.”
Columbus Department of Public Safety Director Kate McSweeney-Pishotti also told The Columbus Dispatch in an emailed statement that Flock Safety’s cameras “have been extremely helpful to the division in locating vehicles linked to violent crimes, including homicides and assaults, and searches for missing and endangered persons.”
The recent news came after the City Council passed the legislative package, introduced last week by Councilmember Lurdes Barroso de Padila and President Pro Temp Rob Dorans, to limit ICE activity within the city, according to ABC 6.
“What we are seeing with ICE is we are seeing a regulated law enforcement agency essentially being lawless in our cities,” de Padilla said. “And so what we are trying to do is say in our city, we do have the jurisdiction under the 10th Amendment to decide how we want to interact with those federal policies. And this is what we have chosen.”
