Local police are tapping school security cameras to help federal agents carry out immigration enforcement raids, according to a new report.
President Donald Trump has promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, putting pressure on federal agents to dramatically increase the number of arrests of undocumented immigrants they are expected to make. Reuters reported in June that the White House was demanding arrest quotas of 3,000 per day.
Amid Trump’s crackdown, local police are searching a national license plate reader database for immigration-related investigations, according to hundreds of thousands of audit logs originating from Texas school districts,The Guardian and The 74, a nonprofit education news organization, reported Tuesday.
The Texas school districts use cameras from Atlanta-based company Flock Safety, which, in part, capture license plate numbers. Flock Safety made clear in a January blog post that it does not work directly with the Department of Homeland Security, including ICE. But the company noted that data collected by its license plate readers is owned by its customers and the customers decide how their data is shared.
The new report named two school districts outside of Houston that have allowed law enforcement to access their cameras.
The Huffman Independent School District granted Customs and Border Patrol access to its license plate readers in May, according to the report. A spokesperson for the school district told The Guardian and The 74 that it was “reviewing the matters you referenced.”
From December 2025 through early January, more than 3,000 law enforcement agencies conducted more than 733,000 searches on the Alvin Independent School District’s cameras, according to the report. Immigration-related reasons were cited 620 times by 30 of those agencies, the report said.
The Independent has reached out to DHS, ICE, CBP, Huffman Independent School District, Alvin Independent School District and Flock Safety for comment.
Immigration enforcement is taking a toll on people’s everyday lives, including in schools.
According to a paper published by the UCLA Institute for Democracy, Education and Access in December 2025, more than two-thirds of high school principals “reported that ‘[s]tudents from immigrant families have expressed concerns about their well-being or the well-being of their families due to policies or political rhetoric related to immigrants.’”
In January, a photo of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos being taken into federal custody with his Spiderman backpack on went viral. Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, were approached by ICE agents outside his home in a Minneapolis suburb after coming home from preschool.
DHS said the child was taken into custody for his safety but a local school official who witnessed the operation said some adults could’ve taken the child.
The agency said Conejo Arias was an “illegal alien from Ecuador,” but the family’s lawyer, Marc Prokosch, told reporters that the father was not an “illegal” immigrant and that he was seeking asylum. The five-year-old and his father have since been released following a federal judge’s order.
Columbia Heights Public Schools said last month four students, including Conejo Ramos, have been detained by ICE.
