How Local Elected Officials Are Trying to Check ICE
Democrats in Congress may be failing to meaningfully check ICE, but that’s not the story in towns and cities. There progressive and socialist lawmakers are working with local movements to craft ways to push back on the agency’s authoritarianism.
Cities across the United States are figuring out how to slow ICE’s reckless authoritarian roll. (Sara Diggins / The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images)
Ending the collection of vehicle location data. Campaigns to pause evictions. Strict limits on where agents can operate. Restrictions on who can collaborate with them.
As Congress has come under bitter criticism for failing to enact stringent enough restrictions on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents more broadly, these are just a few of the ways immigrant rights groups, elected officials, and other organizers at the local level are moving to insulate their neighborhoods from Donald Trump’s turbocharged deportation program. Those efforts, on both coasts and states in between, include cities hardest hit by ICE’s operations and blue hubs in red states that have been relatively untouched, and have seen anti-ICE activists employ an array of legislative tactics to blunt deportation efforts.
It’s a sign of the intensifying opposition, particularly in liberal-leaning urban areas, to deportation tactics that are simultaneously growing more aggressive and more unpopular, and which most recently in Minneapolis left a gaping hole in the city’s budget and two US citizens dead. But it also marks the latest stage in blue America’s embrace of federalism, and a shift in focus on local organizing in the face of what many Democratic voters view as both a hostile presidential administration and weak opposition to it from their own party leaders.
“People are not waiting for help to come from the outside, and certainly not from Washington DC,” says Yusra Murad, an organizer with the Twin Cities tenants currently pushing for an eviction moratorium in response to ICE raids.
In Minneapolis, three-term democratic socialist city councilmember Jason Chavez coauthored a strengthened sanctuary city ordinance that passed unanimously last December. In Portland, Oregon, Sameer Kanal, part of the socialist bloc that holds a third of the city council, has introduced an ordinance that would empower local police to detain masked officers who can’t prove who they are. In Chicago, socialist alderwoman Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez helped craft an ordinance, still in its early stages, that would bar the city from entering into contracts with firms that do business with ICE.
These legislative pushes, while championed and enacted by local elected officials, have been driven by coalitions including neighborhood groups, local immigrant rights activists, and national progressive organizations like Local Progress, which has strategized with lawmakers and worked on ordinance language. The Chicago ordinance targeting city contracts with ICE-friendly firms mirrors a draft ordinance developed by the group, which had worked with Rodriguez early on.
“Our draft is very much modeled on [a] San Francisco and Oakland border wall contractor policy popular in 2017 and 2018, when local jurisdictions didn’t want to do business with companies that were building the wall,” says Hannah Alexander, deputy legal director at Local Progress.
Together with Indivisible, the organization behind the past year’s “No Kings” protests, Local Progress has collected these efforts into a policy tool kit released last week, a resource for municipal elected officials across the country looking for ways to take the initiative on checking ICE. Those ideas, which come complete with draft legislative language and messaging guidance from the organization, include canceling detention contracts with the federal government, and ending participation in Fusion Centers and other “war on terror” holdovers that let local law enforcement share information with the federal government.
Some ideas are not in the toolkit but are being independently considered. In San Diego, Sean Elo-Rivera, a Local Progress member and two-term council member, has backed the idea of barring ICE and other DHS agents from future employment by the city — say, as police officers or teachers — a measure echoed in a bill introduced in the California State Assembly earlier this month. Meanwhile, Alexander says the group is exploring ways, in concert with officials and local activists, to push back on ICE’s buy-up of warehouses around the country to create a network of massive detention centers.
Flock of See-Gulls
One of their major targets is ICE and DHS’s access to vast stores of data on US residents. ICE has in recent years quietly morphed into a vast domestic spy agency, able to gather intimate data on virtually every adult in the country and do so without a warrant, by simply buying access from the many private data brokers that collect and sell Americans’ personal information to commercial clients.
For local anti-ICE coalitions, checking this has meant targeting city contracts with automatic license plate reader (ALPR) companies, one above all: Flock Safety, a nearly $8 billion company with a checkered history. Flock’s troves of vehicle data have been used by law enforcement agencies to quietly surveil everyone from anti-Trump protesters to women in red states who are trying to get abortions.
The ubiquitous technology, which as many as 93 percent of police departments in large US cities use, employs a network of special cameras to record cars’ license plate numbers and the time and place they were seen, along with their colors, makes, models, and what it calls “vehicle fingerprint technology”: details like bumper stickers, roof racks, and scratches. It stores all of this in a searchable database that effectively acts as a map of the movements and routines of US vehicles and the people driving them. Little wonder, then, that they have been enthusiastically adopted by Border Patrol and ICE to help track down people to deport.
A major victory on this front came last year in Austin, where socialist city council member Mike Siegel spearheaded a successful effort to end the city’s contract with Flock, which had set up a pilot program with the local police department in 2023. While civil liberties concerns have long swirled around ALPRs, the Trump administration’s deportation program changed the political calculus as the contract’s renewal came up last June.
“When ALPRs were first introduced in Austin, the discussion was very much about missing children. There wasn’t much conversation about the harms,” says Alexander. “The conversation changed because of this political environment and the real and intense risks to immigrants, dissenters, and other marginalized people.”
Siegel, a civil rights lawyer, credits local community organizing with this shift.
“My office worked with criminal legal reform advocates, privacy advocates, and the local Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to create a community coalition very involved in this issue, and which brought a lot of stakeholders to city hall who weren’t previously involved,” says Siegel, himself a DSA member. “It played a huge role in convincing the council to tell city staff we don’t want this.”
A number of the assurances made to the city council when it originally voted through the pilot program — like the then-mayor’s assertion that it was “probably unlikely” the data would be used by immigration enforcement, or the then-police chief’s insistence that “there are no photos that are actually stored” — proved to be false. Meanwhile, Siegel’s office found that in the years the program was in place, 11,000 of Austin police searches on Flock, or 18 percent, violated the requirement put in place by the council that they include a valid reason for the search.
It was a similar story in Denver, whose contract with Flock went into effect two years ago.
“They were putting the cameras in the wealthiest, whitest districts. We didn’t understand how insidious this technology was at the time, so it sailed through,” says at-large city councilor Sarah Parady. Since then, Parady has led the charge against the contract on the city council, as violations came to light and local opposition grew.
Despite assurances that the data would be controlled by the Denver Police Department, who are forbidden by state law from assisting federal immigration enforcement efforts, it soon turned out that the Denver PD had let law enforcement agencies around the country search its data more than 1,400 times between June 2024 and April 2025, often for immigration-related reasons. A few months later, local news revealed that a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives agent had used the neighboring town of Loveland’s Flock account to search Denver’s data on behalf of ICE, and that the city’s police force had given US Border Patrol access to its Flock data. CEO Garrett Langley personally apologized to Parady over email for what he framed as “inadvertently inaccurate” public statements he had made about his company’s relationship with federal agencies.
As the contract came up for renewal in May last year, Parady raised fears that Flock’s data would be used to assist the Trump administration’s drastically ramped-up deportation operations, fears echoed by hundreds of constituents who other city councilors reported had communicated their opposition to the contract. Constituents crowded public comment sessions on the matter to demand an end to the contract. Under pressure, Mayor Mike Johnston asked the council to reject the $666,000 contract extension.
Despite initially folding to public opposition, Johnston ended up unilaterally renewing the Flock contract through October last year, taking advantage of a loophole that allows city contracts to be extended without council review if their cost falls below $500,000. After the vote, Flock lowered its price tag to $499,000. Then he did it again last October, after the company offered a five-month extension at no cost at all.
Yet as that contract’s March 31 expiry neared this year, Johnston finally announced earlier this week that the city was dumping Flock for good. His hand was partly forced by the city auditor, who announced he would refuse to sign the contract, pointing to the privacy and liability risks from the violations that have already accrued. The city will now partner with a different ALPR company, Axon — though the concerns that animated opposition to the Flock contract haven’t gone away.
“I am pleased to see the mayor finally recognizing the warnings that community members, privacy experts, and advocates have raised about Flock for nearly a year,” says Parady, while cautioning that neither she nor other council members worked on or have even seen the privacy protections that will be included in the new contract they will eventually have to vote on. “Denver residents want a voice in decisions about technologies that surveil our communities.”
However provisional, these victories are spreading.
“The coalition that formed to stop ALPRs in Austin has become a regional coalition and won several victories,” says Siegel.
“A lot of the Central Texas region has canceled their contracts or have shelved expansion of additional ALPRs,” says Alexander. Last October, Hays County became the first county in Texas to end an ALPR contract, while two months later, neighboring San Marcos saw its own Flock contract expire after its city council deadlocked over renewing it.
All Go on Eviction Pause
Arguably the most sweeping attempts to push back against Trump’s deportation program have been a series of campaigns for local eviction moratoriums.
With undocumented Americans losing income by sheltering from roving deportation agents, the demand emerged last year as a way to protect migrants from the Sophie’s choice of either leaving home to work and risking capture, or lacking the means to afford rent and being thrown out on the street anyway. A tenant-union-led campaign in Los Angeles County helped the measure advance quickly through the county board of supervisors in the back half of 2025, in direct response to the deployment of federal agents in the city that summer, the administration’s first major blitz against a blue city.
Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, council member Robin Wonsley, together with several others on the council’s socialist bloc, moved forward a successful ordinance calling on Minnesota governor Tim Walz to, as he did during the pandemic, declare a state of emergency and sign a statewide eviction pause via executive order. That nonbinding resolution passed unanimously through Minneapolis’s city council — and, soon after, St Paul’s as well — a month and a half into the administration’s Operation Metro Surge in the city, just a week after an ICE agent killed local mother Renée Good.
Both have since run into political headwinds. In LA County, the measure has stalled at the county board of supervisors, where focus has shifted instead to implementing a more than $44.6 million rent relief program that covers a maximum of six months of payments, and raising the threshold for eviction from one month’s late rent to two or even three. While welcome measures, housing activists are skeptical this will be enough. Chelsea Kirk, an LA Tenants Union organizer with the Rent Brigade, says that not only are some immigrant tenants as much as eight months behind on rent, but surveys the group conducted found many were even not aware of the rent relief program, which only landlords can apply for and was launched during peak vacation time just before Christmas.
“We would have the highest evictable rent threshold in the country. On its own, that’s a great victory,” says Kirk. “But to meet the moment, which is that immigrant renters are falling behind on rent and being evicted, it’ll do nothing.”
In Minneapolis, by contrast, the only roadblock is Gov. Tim Walz, who has steadfastly ignored mounting calls from renters, unions, and local lawmakers to issue an eviction pause, even as ICE continues operating and making arrests in the suburbs and other areas outside of the Twin Cities. Earlier this month, Local Progress members in Minneapolis delivered a letter to Walz signed by more than 135 local officials affiliated with the group urging him to take the step, while on February 25, dozens of the city’s residents staged a peaceful protest at city hall in favor of the measure.
“We’ve had two of our neighbors killed, we’ve seen extreme levels of violence and terror from federal agents occupying our city,” says Yusra Murad, an organizer with Twin Cities tenants. “If this isn’t a state of emergency, I don’t know what is.”
But neither the demand for an eviction moratorium nor the organizing energy behind it are likely to go away anytime soon. In LA County, organizers are regrouping and looking at pushing for a more targeted, less geographically sweeping pause. In the Twin Cities, a coalition of tenant unions are gearing up for what they’re billing as the “largest rent strike in the United States in the last hundred years” on March 1 to pressure Walz into finally pulling the trigger on a pause.
“We all take this very, very seriously,” says Murad. “This is not a small ask or low risk, to ask people to withhold their rent.”
The demand is gaining traction. The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board last week became the first local government body to issue its own version of the measure in response to the economic pressures caused by Metro Surge, suspending evictions from its small portfolio of rental properties. The measure is also being debated by the city council in nearby Duluth, while in Maine, where Trump surged deportation agents this past January, Gov. Janet Mills is considering calls for a sixty-day moratorium formally requested by the Portland and South Portland city councils.
An Unintended Legacy
The eagerness of US towns and cities to push back on deportation operations is about more than blue America’s distaste for the current president. It reflects the tidal wave of socialist and progressive victories that has swept local politics in recent years.
By last year, more than 250 DSA members held elected office in forty states, in a number of cases, as in Minneapolis and Portland, holding senior positions or even a plurality of seats on their respective legislative bodies. Progressives have racked up local victories right alongside them, including winning mayoralties in cities like Boston and Chicago. And that was all before socialist Zohran Mamdani delivered the political upset of the decade by defeating one of New York’s most powerful families to take charge of the country’s biggest city.
Those victories have set the stage for a growing assertiveness at the local level against federal overreach, even as top-ranking Democrats at the national level are widely viewed as floundering and failing to mount a meaningful resistance. And as with the local push for an eviction pause in Minnesota, an anti-ICE measure that would double as a response to the nation’s housing crisis, it is having a radicalizing political effect that goes well beyond today’s ICE operations, one unwittingly being fueled by a right-wing administration.
“Even if we can’t win, we are giving each other the permission to believe we are fighting for something we are worthy of,” says Murad. “Let that struggle illuminate the world we are striving toward together.”