On November 21, 2023, Field Intelligence Officers at the Department of Homeland Security have quietly removed a trove of Chicago Police Death Records. It wasn’t normal.
For seven months, data records were requested from nearly 900 Chicagoland residents – they remain on the Federal server in violation of the deletion order issued by the Deletion body issued by the diversion body. A recent investigation found that nearly 800 files were stored, the report said, following regulations made to protect domestic intelligence operations from targeting rural residents. The records come from private exchanges between DHS analysts and Chicago police, which local psychological tests can do to feed the federal government’s watch list. The idea was to see if street-level data could isolate Agnomed gang members in airports, airports and border crossings. The trial fell amid what the government described as a series of misbehavior and failures.
Internal memos reviewed by The Wire reveal that the dataset was first requested by a field officer in the DHS office of intelligence recovery and analysis (i&a) in the summer of 2021. City inspectors have warned that the police will not reduce their accuracy. Entries created by the police include people who were born before 1901 and some who appeared to be children. Some are labeled by the police as gang members but are not connected to any particular group.
The police are sidelined with information, listing people’s jobs as “Scum Bag,” “Turd,” or simply “Black.” There is no need to be bound or convinced to make a list.
Prosecutors and police rely on the understanding of suspected gang members for their coverage and investigations. They put surprises on bail hearings and report sentences. For immigrants, they carry more weight. Chicago’s sacred laws prevented most of the data sharing by meeting officials, but Carve-Out at that time “gang members” were left to open the back door. Over a decade, immigration officials have been pulled from the database more than 32,000 times, records show.
The & a memos – first obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice in New York through a public records request – show that what started as discrimination soon became a cascade of terminations. Chicagoland’s request for data submitted for review layers without a clear owner, its legal protections ignored or ignored. By the time the data reached the I&A server in April 2022, the officer had already started the transfer and left his post. The experiment eventually collapsed under its own papers. Signatures were lost, audits were not filed, and the deadline for removal was being ignored. Guardrails meant to keep the intelligence community focused outside — on foreign threats, not Americans — have simply failed.
When faced with the eapse, the & A groaned at the end of the project in November 2023, erasing the dataset and accused of violating the systematic report.
Spencer Reynolds, senior counsel at the Brennan Center, said the episode shows how intelligence officials can throw local law enforcement officials. “This technical office is an independent project that is called the protection of Chicago’s limited organizations in direct cooperation with the snow,” he said. “Federal intelligence officers can go into the information, package it, and then give it to the migration traffic, to implement important policies to protect the residents.”
