STOP SHARING DRIVER DATA WITH ICE IN WASHINGTON STATE

ICE is using Washington State license plate data to track down and kidnap immigrants across the state using violent and frequently unconstitutional tactics.

The University of Washington Center for Human Rights has documented that while state law forbids state agencies to share data with ICE, data sharing is still occurring through the Nlets interstate data querying system.

We call on Governor Ferguson to:

1.      Require a judicial warrant for ALL federal queries of Washington State licensing data, whether through the DAPS or the Nlets system. If the request is legitimate, and not related to immigration enforcement, obtaining a warrant should not be prohibitive.

2.      Cease the practice of selling driver and vehicle data to private companies. This is OUR data. Based on the UW Research, we know that the contract between ICE and LexisNexis “requires LexisNexis to structure its database querying system in such a way that records of ICE’s searches cannot be used or shared for any purpose – indeed, in such a way that even for LexisNexis itself, it would be impossible to know which of its data had been queried by ICE, and to what end.”

3.      Take steps as needed to prevent informal sharing of data by local agencies.