A group of 40 Democratic lawmakers have sent a letter to 19 state governors warning that they may be “inadvertently sharing drivers’ data with federal immigration authorities.”
According to the letter, the states “are providing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies ‘with frictionless, self-service access to the personal data of all of your residents,’” through the nonprofit National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (Nlets) which has been used by states for over two decades to share personal data of residents—including driver license data from a state’s Department of Motor Vehicles—for law enforcement activities.
According to the letter, the use of Nlets allows “agencies to directly access residents’ data without the knowledge or involvement of any state employee.” Further, Nlets facilitated “over 290 million queries for DMV data, with more than 290,000 queries from ICE and some 600,000 from Homeland Security Investigations during the year before October 1, 2025.” The letter alleges that the queries have increased during the Trump administration.
The letter states “It is now abundantly clear that a major reason that so few states have locked down the data they share through Nlets is because of an information gap.” “Because of the technical complexity of Nlets’ system, few state government officials understand how their state is sharing their residents’ data with federal and out-of-state agencies.”
The lawmakers urge governors to block “unfettered access” to the data, which “would not prevent federal agencies obtaining information from states for solving serious crimes, but taking action would ‘increase accountability and reduce abuse’ by allowing state employees to review data requests first.” According to the letter, “This commonsense step will improve public safety and guard against Trump officials using your state’s data for unjustified, politicized actions, while still allowing continued collaboration on serious crimes.”
According to the letter, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Washington have already blocked the information sharing and Oregon is in the process of doing so. Nlets states on its website that “we are the information superhighway of the law enforcement community….We do not own any of the data that is being used in the criminal justice or public safety realm – we exist solely for the purpose of securely accessing that information and providing it to the criminal justice community.”
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