Friend –

The Senate is trying to quietly hand the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) more power to spy on us. They're hoping nobody notices.

The Combating Organized Retail Crime Act (CORCA) is being sold as a way to stop shoplifting. But instead of making our neighborhoods safer, it would be a massive expansion of the surveillance state. This bill would give ICE and other federal agencies even more power to track our movements, monitor our associations, and collect people's personal data for anyone to access.

Tell your Senators to reject CORCA.

With new funding for automatic license plate readers and other surveillance tech, CORCA would effectively give ICE the ability to watch every strip mall and grocery store parking lot throughout the US. While they already had access to some of this data through partnerships with local police departments and companies like Flock Safety, CORCA would create a "central coordination center," giving them a direct line to track our every move and compile detailed dossiers on each of us.

Under this bill, every single person would be tracked and targeted by mass surveillance technologies with a long history of misidentifying and harming the people they claim to protect. And already-overpoliced groups like Black, brown, and immigrant communities would face an even greater threat.

ICE already operates with little to no transparency and accountability. Expanding DHS's power to surveil us would only increase the risk of abuse, especially as the Trump administration continues to ramp up its cruel deportation agenda.

CORCA won't keep us safe. What it will do is expand mass warrantless surveillance, putting all of our rights at risk.

The House already passed this bill back in May. Now the Senate is trying to slip it into the annual defense budget before the public catches on. Urge your Senators to reject CORCA and protect our communities from this privacy-destroying legislation.

In action,

Nina Patel
Pronouns: She, her, hers
Senior Policy Counsel, ACLU