A group of Democratic lawmakers has sent letters to several state governors, including Arizona, California, Colorado and Wisconsin, warning that their states are inadvertently sharing driver data with federal immigration authorities.
The letterwhere was first reported by Reuterstold governors that their states give U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies “seamless, self-service access to the personal data of all your residents,” through a nonprofit organization run by state law enforcement agencies called the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, or Nlets.
Nlets facilitates the sharing of state residents’ personal data, in this case driver’s license data, between state, local and federal police agencies.
The lawmakers asked the governor’s panel to end 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 driver’s licenses and other information from each state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) database, available for search and retrieval by approximately 18,000 federal and local law enforcement agencies in the US and Canada. This practice allows these agencies to directly access residents’ data without the knowledge or involvement of any government official, according to the letter.
The letter said it’s possible ICE is using driver’s license photos for its facial recognition app called Mobile Fortify, which agents use to identify people on the street and relies on 200 million photos.
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According to the letter, Nlets facilitated “more than 290 million requests for DMV data,” with more than 290,000 requests from ICE and about 600,000 from Homeland Security Investigations during the year before Oct. 1, 2025.
“It is now abundantly clear that a major reason so few states have locked down the data shared through Nlets is because of an information gap,” the letter states. “Due to the technical complexity of the Nlets system, few state government officials understand how their state shares their residents’ data with federal and outside agencies,” the letter read.
The letter said blocking the agencies’ “unfettered access” would not prevent federal agencies from receiving information from states to solve serious crimes, but taking action would “increase accountability and reduce abuse” by allowing state officials to vet data requests first.
Lawmakers noted that some states, including Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Washington, have recently limited the type of data ICE can access through Nlets, and reminded governors that it’s up to them to stop the practice at any time.
