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Police gang databases<\/span> are known to be faulty. The secret registries allow state and local cops to feed civilians\u2019 personal information into massive, barely regulated lists based on speculative criteria \u2014 like their personal contacts, clothing, and tattoos \u2014 even if they haven\u2019t committed a crime. The databases aren\u2019t subject to judicial review, and they don\u2019t require police to notify the people they peg as gang members.<\/p>\n They\u2019re an ideal tool for officials seeking to imply criminality without due process. And many are directly accessible to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.<\/p>\n An investigation by The Intercept found that at least eight states and large municipalities funnel their gang database entries to ICE \u2014 which can then use the information to target people for arrest, deportation, or rendition to so-called \u201cthird countries.\u201d Some of the country\u2019s largest and most immigrant-dense states, like Texas, New York, Illinois, and Virginia, route the information to ICE through varied paths that include a decades-old police clearinghouse and a network of post-9\/11 intelligence-sharing hubs.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Both federal immigration authorities and local police intelligence units operate largely in secret, and the full extent of the gang database-sharing between them is unknown. What is known, however, is that the lists are riddled with mistakes: Available research<\/a>, reporting<\/a>, and audits have revealed that many contain<\/a> widespread errors<\/a> and encourage<\/a> racial profiling<\/a>.<\/p>\n The flawed systems could help ICE expand its dragnet as it seeks to carry out President Donald Trump\u2019s promised \u201cmass deportation\u201d campaign. The administration has cited common tattoos<\/a> and other spurious evidence<\/a> to create its own lists of supposed gang members, invoking <\/a>the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to send hundreds to El Salvador\u2019s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center prison, also known as CECOT. Gang databases The Intercept identified as getting shared with ICE contain hundreds of thousands of other entries, including some targeted at Central American communities<\/a> that have landed in the administration\u2019s crosshairs. That information can torpedo asylum and other immigration applications and render those seeking legal status deportable.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re going after the asylum system on every front they can<\/a>,\u201d said Andrew Case, supervising counsel for criminal justice issues at the nonprofit LatinoJustice. \u201cUsing gang affiliation as a potential weapon in that fight is very scary.\u201d<\/p>\n Information supplied by local gang databases has already driven at least one case that became a national flashpoint: To justify sending Kilmar Abrego Garcia to CECOT in March, federal officials used a disputed<\/a> report that a disgraced<\/a> Maryland cop submitted to a defunct<\/a> registry to label him as a member of a transnational gang. The report cited<\/a> the word of an unnamed informant, Abrego\u2019s hoodie, and a Chicago Bulls cap \u2014 items \u201cindicative of the Hispanic gang culture,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n The case echoed patterns from Trump\u2019s first term, when ICE leaned on similar information from local cops \u2014 evidence as flimsy as doodles in a student\u2019s notebook<\/a> \u2014 to label immigrants as gang members eligible for deportation. As Trump\u2019s second administration shifts its immigration crackdown into overdrive<\/a>, ICE is signaling with cases like Abrego\u2019s that it\u2019s eager to continue fueling it with local police intelligence.<\/p>\n Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council, argued that this kind of information-sharing boosts ICE\u2019s ability to target people without due process.<\/p>\n \u201cThis opens the door to an incredible amount of abuse,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is our worst fear.\u201d<\/p>\n In February,<\/span> ICE arrested Francisco Garcia Casique, a barber from Venezuela living in Texas. The agency alleged that he was a member of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang at the center<\/a> of the latest anti-immigrant panic, and sent him to CECOT.<\/p>\n Law enforcement intelligence on Garcia Casique was full of errors: A gang database entry contained the wrong mugshot and appears to have confused him with a man whom Dallas police interviewed about a Mexican gang, USA Today reported<\/a>. Garcia Casique\u2019s family insists he was never in a gang.<\/p>\n It\u2019s unclear exactly what role the faulty gang database entry played in Garcia Casique\u2019s rendition, which federal officials insist wasn\u2019t a mistake. But ICE agents had direct access to it \u2014 plus tens of thousands of other entries from the same database \u2014 The Intercept has found.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n