A group of Democratic lawmakers have sent letters to several state governors, including in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Wisconsin, warning that their states are inadvertently sharing drivers’ data with federal immigration authorities.
The letter, which was first reported by Reuters, told governors that their states are providing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies “with frictionless, self-service access to the personal data of all of your residents,” through a nonprofit managed by state police agencies called the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, or Nlets.
Nlets facilitates the sharing of state residents’ personal data, in this case driver license data, between state, local, and federal police agencies.
The lawmakers asked the group of governors to stop the practice and block access to ICE and “other federal agencies that are now acting as Trump’s shock troops.”
ICE and Nlets did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
For two decades, most states have made their residents’ data, such as drivers’ licenses and other information from each state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) database, available for search and retrieval to approximately 18,000 federal and local law enforcement agencies across the U.S. and Canada. This practice allows those agencies to directly access residents’ data without the knowledge or involvement of any state employee, according to the letter.
The letter said that it’s possible that ICE is using drivers’ license photos for their facial recognition app called Mobile Fortify, which agents are using to identify people on the street and relies on 200 million photos.
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According to the letter, Nlets facilitated “over 290 million queries for DMV data,” with more than 290,000 queries from ICE and some 600,000 from Homeland Security Investigations during the year before October 1, 2025.
“It is now abundantly clear that a major reason that so few states have locked down the data they share through Nlets is because of an information gap,” reads the letter. “Because of the technical complexity of Nlets’ system, few state government officials understand how their state is sharing their residents’ data with federal and out-of-state agencies,” read the letter.
The letter said blocking the agencies’ “unfettered access” would not prevent federal agencies obtaining information from states for solving serious crimes, but taking action would “increase accountability and reduce abuse” by allowing state employees to review data requests first.
The lawmakers noted that some states, including Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Washington recently restricted what kind of data ICE can access via Nlets, and reminded the governors that it is up to them to stop the practice at any time.
