1. United States
2. Fla.
3. Letter

I am writing to demand immediate transparency about surveillance technology in our schools and to urge you to oppose any contracts with Flock Safety or similar companies that enable immigration enforcement on school campuses. A recent investigation by The 74 and The Guardian uncovered that police departments nationwide are using school district security cameras to assist federal immigration enforcement. At Alvin Independent School District south of Houston, over 3,100 police agencies conducted more than 733,000 searches on just eight school cameras during one month from December 2024 through early January 2025. Immigration-related reasons were cited 620 times by 30 law enforcement agencies from states including Florida, Georgia, Indiana, and Tennessee. This surveillance infrastructure was installed for student safety, not to track families during school drop-offs and pick-ups. Yet audit logs reveal that Flock searches for civil immigration reasons at Alvin schools were more than twice as frequent as those for immigrants suspected of committing crimes. School districts appear unaware that out-of-state officers routinely access their cameras for immigration purposes, even when district police themselves cannot search their own devices for such reasons. The Trump administration ended longstanding protections against immigration enforcement in and around schools, and educators, parents, and students as young as 5 have been swept up in raids. Flock Safety operates 90,000 cameras across 7,000 networks nationally, with more than 100 public school systems using these devices. The 287(g) program, which deputizes local officers for immigration enforcement, has grown by 600% during Trump's second term. I urge you to take three specific actions: require school districts to disclose whether they use Flock license plate readers and how data is shared, prohibit school surveillance technology from being used for immigration enforcement purposes, and oppose any new contracts with Flock Safety until meaningful guardrails prevent misuse. Schools must be safe spaces for all students, not extensions of federal immigration enforcement operations.