When residents told council their fear was federal agencies reaching Asheville’s cameras, Deputy Chief Sean Aardema answered with a promise: “We control Axon Fusus and we will not be sharing information with federal immigration.” (WLOS, May 14, 2026)
Officials in Evanston, Denver, Spokane, Minneapolis, and San Diego made similar statements; their audit logs are cited below. This page collects what the logs show for three groups.
Immigrant neighbors
How federal access happened. ICE has no Flock contract. It doesn’t need one. When 404 Media obtained audit logs from a single Illinois police department’s Flock network, they showed local officers across the country had run more than 4,000 nationwide searches listing “ICE,” “ICE+ERO,” “illegal immigration,” or “ICE WARRANT” as the reason: federal immigration enforcement riding local logins. Every search explicitly listing “immigration” came after January 2025. (404 Media) Separately, Customs and Border Protection held direct access to more than 80,000 Flock cameras through a pilot program, one that Flock ran while telling local customers it had no DHS relationship, and that at least one police department says it never knew about. Senator Wyden’s investigation later documented pilots for CBP, HSI, the Secret Service, and NCIS, with Flock admitting customers “were inaccurately informed.” (404 Media · Wyden letter, primary PDF)
State and local rules in the documented cases. The University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights mapped three pathways (“front door, back door, side door”) by which Border Patrol reached local camera data in a state whose law restricts exactly that: ten Washington agencies had Border Patrol searches in their audit logs that they never authorized. (UW Center for Human Rights) Evanston and Oak Park, Illinois (sanctuary towns in a state that bans sharing plate data for immigration enforcement) discovered CBP had accessed their cameras anyway; the Illinois Secretary of State found Flock broke state law, and both towns terminated their contracts. (ABC7 Chicago · Wednesday Journal) Denver’s logs showed 1,400+ ICE-related searches of its data since June 2024; its council then rejected a new Flock contract unanimously. (Colorado Newsline) In Bend, Oregon, federal immigration officials made 279 queries in the cameras’ first three weeks. (Bend Source) During the December 2025 “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis–St. Paul, outside agencies searched Twin Cities plate data for immigration purposes hundreds of times despite Minnesota law limiting the data to criminal investigations. (Star Tribune) The pattern was strong enough that Congress opened a formal investigation into Flock. (404 Media)
Flock’s changes. After the exposés, Flock added keyword blocks and replaced the free-text reason with a dropdown. Santa Cruz found the keyword filter “could simply be bypassed by choosing a different option from the dropdown menu”; as of August 2026, officers “can type any case number.” (Flock’s own timeline · TechTimes) Wyden’s conclusion, again: abuse is “inevitable,” and his recommendation to communities was not better settings: it was removal.
North Carolina law. State law HB 10 (passed November 2024 over a veto) requires all 100 sheriffs to honor ICE detainers. Sheriff Quentin Miller (who ended Buncombe’s 287(g) participation in 2019) put his own limit on it plainly: “I do not make the laws, I only enforce the laws.” (WFAE · Enlace Latino NC) Raleigh PD’s own logs already list “ICE” as the reason for Flock searches. (INDY Week) The 2025 state budget made the SBI’s Flock camera program permanent on state roads. (Carolina Journal) A sheriff’s personal assurance, an APD policy, a council resolution: none of it binds the state, the network, or the next administration of any of them.
What this does to people is measured, not imagined. In the KFF/New York Times 2025 Survey of Immigrants, roughly three-quarters of likely-undocumented immigrants said they or a family member had limited activities outside the home since January 2025; about 1 in 7 avoided health care, church, or work; 1 in 10 kept children home from school events. (KFF) ICE enforcement has already touched a Buncombe County church and school campuses (February 2025). (Fox Carolina) Tens of thousands of Buncombe residents were born outside the U.S. Every camera added to the mesh raises the cost, for all of them, of driving to church, to school, to the clinic.
People seeking reproductive care
The Texas search, May 2025. In May 2025, a Johnson County, Texas deputy ran a nationwide Flock search for a woman who had self-managed an abortion. Two queries: the first hit 17,684 cameras; the expanded one, 6,809 networks and 83,345 cameras, including in states where abortion is legal. The reason field read: “had an abortion, search for female.” No warrant. The sheriff called it a welfare check; the lead detective’s own sworn affidavit called it a “death investigation… of a non-viable fetus,” deputies collected the FedEx envelope the medication arrived in, and the DA’s office was asked whether the woman could be charged. Flock called the reporting “false” and “clickbait”; then the case file surfaced. (404 Media · EFF, with the affidavit)
Kate Bertash of the Digital Defense Fund named what that search was: “You have this extraterritorial reach into other states, and Flock has decided to create a technology that breaks through the barriers.”
North Carolina’s position. North Carolina bans abortion after 12 weeks, and is nonetheless the second-largest destination in the country for out-of-state abortion patients: roughly 37% of the ~48,000 abortions provided in NC in 2025 were for people from other states, per Guttmacher estimates. (NC Health News) Asheville’s Planned Parenthood is the sole abortion provider in Western North Carolina, and as far back as October 2022 reported more than half its patients coming from out of state: Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Alabama. (Asheville Watchdog)
The Texas search reached cameras in other states with one query; Asheville shared its reads across a 500-mile radius until August 2026. California’s attorney general has sued to stop plate-data sharing explicitly citing the risk to people “coming to California for reproductive care.” (CA AG) Illinois wrote abortion into its plate-reader law. North Carolina has no equivalent shield law. Asheville’s protection, in full, is: an APD policy, revisable without a vote.
Protesters
What the logs show. EFF analyzed 12+ million Flock searches by nearly 4,000 agencies (December 2024–October 2025) and found police running nationwide plate queries with logged reasons like “protest,” “no kings,” and “KINGS DAY PROTEST”; that last one, from a Texas department, traversed 1,774 camera networks. Sheriff’s offices searched plates around the February 2025 “50501” protests and May Day rallies; nineteen agencies ran searches tied to the No Kings demonstrations. U.S. Border Patrol logged searches under “Portland Riots”, and ran seven searches on a motorist whose offense was extending a middle finger at an agent. (EFF) None of these required a crime. EFF’s summary: officers “probed the nationwide network with terms like ‘protest’ without articulating an actual crime under investigation.”
In 2020, license-plate readers were part of the documented surveillance arsenal deployed against George Floyd protesters. (BuzzFeed News) And North Carolina has its own entry: a geofence warrant was used to identify students who marched against UNC’s Confederate statue. (The Marshall Project)
The Asheville convergence. On August 29 to September 1, 2026, Asheville hosted the U.S. G20 Finance Track meetings: finance ministers, central bank governors, federal security, road closures. (U.S. Treasury) To be precise: there is no evidence the RTIC was built for the G20: the funding request predates the announcement, and the center isn’t slated to be fully operational until 2027. Asheville’s plate readers were in the same network that agencies elsewhere searched with the reason “protest”, and the county’s real-time center, running since 2023, was live throughout. Whether any search of Asheville-area plate data was tagged to the summit’s protests is a records question; no log has been published as of Sept 8, 2026.
What the logs have in common
Every group on this page was promised the same thing Asheville was promised: local control, narrow purpose, audited access. Each audit log above was obtained by records request; none of the findings appeared on an agency’s own portal first. Our concern is accountability and oversight, not cameras as such; the position is stated in full on the homepage.
Related: What a plate read becomes · Cameras in Public Housing · Camera network misuse, documented cases · Asheville’s RTIC claims and the record · Getting Flock Out · Speak at Council