1. United States
2. N.C.
3. Letter

Strip CORCA from the NDAA. The Combating Organized Retail Crime Act is not a retail theft bill — it's a surveillance bill that hands ICE sweeping new power to harvest Americans' personal data and share it however its own appointed director decides is "operationally necessary." That vague standard means whatever ICE needs it to mean, with no meaningful transparency or accountability for the people whose data gets swept up. The contradiction here is glaring. Senate Democrats shut down DHS for 76 days to protest abusive immigration enforcement, and now more than a dozen of them are co-sponsoring a bill that lets ICE quietly build a public-private surveillance network by deputizing retailers like Home Depot to do the data collection for them. As the Vera Institute's Insha Rahman put it: "It is inexcusable and inexplicable to claim to want to rein in ICE and then vote to empower their abusive practices." The NDAA vote is weeks away. Vote no on any version that includes CORCA. Democratic voters watched ICE brutalize residents in Minneapolis and Chicago. They are watching now too.