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3h ago

Democrats Urge Governors to Cut ICE’s Direct Access to State DMV Data

Their letters cite hundreds of thousands of annual lookups as evidence of opaque data flows that leave states unaware of how resident information is used.

Commuters arrive at Holland Tunnel to drive into New York from Jersey City, New Jersey November 7, 2012. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
Governor of California Gavin Newsom attends a press conference during the COP30 UN Climate Change Conference in Belem, Para State, Brazil on November 11, 2025. Brazil is betting its much-hyped climate summit in the Amazon next month can deliver something increasingly rare in a fractured world: proof that nations can still unite to confront a global crisis (Photo by Mauro PIMENTEL / AFP) (Photo by MAURO PIMENTEL/AFP via Getty Images)

Overview

  • On Nov. 12, Sen. Ron Wyden and 39 Democrats released letters urging governors to block Immigration and Customs Enforcement from querying DMV records via the Nlets network.
  • The letters say Nlets enables self-service searches by roughly 18,000 agencies without state-employee review, reflecting a decades-old data-sharing setup.
  • In the year before Oct. 1, 2025, Nlets logged over 290 million DMV queries overall, including more than 290,000 by ICE and about 600,000 by Homeland Security Investigations.
  • A few states have restricted access already, including New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Minnesota, with Washington recently barring ICE and Oregon moving to do so.
  • ICE and Nlets did not comment, and the lawmakers propose curbing unfettered access while preserving cooperation on serious crimes, noting DMV photos could potentially feed ICE’s Mobile Fortify facial-recognition tool.