Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Michigan’s 12th District escalated her long-running campaign against expanding federal surveillance on July 20, 2026, singling out the license plate-reading company Flock Safety in a pointed post on X. “Flock – a private surveillance company worth $8.4 billion – contracts with ICE and CBP to turn out neighborhoods into mass surveillance zones,” Tlaib wrote at 8:37 a.m. “Their AI-powered license plate readers performed 20 billion scans of cars EVERY MONTH. That should terrify everyone.”
The post landed as scrutiny of Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) network has intensified nationally. Flock cameras are now installed in more than 5,000 communities across 49 states, according to the company’s own figures, and the network as a whole processes more than 20 billion vehicle scans per month, the same figure Tlaib cited. Each scan captures not just a plate number but a vehicle’s make, model, color and identifying features such as bumper stickers or damage, which are then cataloged and made searchable across jurisdictions.
Tlaib’s specific claim that Flock “contracts with ICE and CBP” reflects a debate that has played out publicly between the company and its critics. Flock Safety has stated that it does not hold a direct contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and that the agency does not have direct access to its platform, noting that local police departments — not Flock itself — own and control the camera data in their jurisdictions. Reporting from 404 Media and other outlets, however, has documented that ICE officials have repeatedly asked local and state law enforcement agencies to run searches of Flock’s nationwide database on the federal government’s behalf, producing what journalists have described as “side-door access” without a formal contract. Sen. Ron Wyden has separately written to Flock’s CEO stating the company had granted platform access to Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security Investigations, the Secret Service and the Navy’s Criminal Investigative Service, and he has urged communities that installed Flock cameras to reconsider that decision. An audit released by the city of Oxnard, California, in February found that federal agencies including the FBI, ICE, CBP, the ATF and the DEA had queried a local police department’s Flock data, in some instances logging only “CBP” or “ICE” as the search justification with no case number or warrant attached.
The July 20 post was not an isolated remark for Tlaib but the latest entry in a sustained record of statements and legislative actions targeting what she and allied Democrats describe as an unchecked expansion of domestic surveillance under the current administration. Nine days earlier, on the House Oversight Committee, Tlaib questioned an ICE whistleblower and a former Department of Homeland Security general counsel during a February 23, 2026 hearing examining warrantless federal enforcement actions inside American communities, part of a broader effort by committee Democrats to document what they have called agents “terrorizing communities without warrants.”
Tlaib has also repeatedly invoked the Fourth Amendment directly in her legislative work this year. She joined Judiciary Committee Democrats, including Reps. Pramila Jayapal, Mary Gay Scanlon and Lucy McBath, in sending a formal letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and acting ICE Director Todd Lyons demanding the agency rescind an internal memorandum the lawmakers said authorized agents to enter American homes without a judicial warrant. “ICE does not have the authority to overturn any law, let alone one of the foundational constitutional rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights,” the lawmakers wrote, adding that ICE’s own training materials acknowledge warrantless home entries typically violate the Fourth Amendment. The letter noted that the amendment’s protections extend to “people,” not just citizens, rejecting arguments from DHS General Counsel Jimmy Percival that non-citizens fall outside its scope.
Tlaib’s concern with surveillance technology extends beyond Flock and ICE’s use of license plate data. In February 2026, she was among a group of House members, led by Rep. Shontel Brown, who sent an oversight letter to DHS raising alarms about ICE’s acquisition of surveillance tools from a company called Penlink, which the lawmakers said was designed to collect and analyze cellphone location data across entire neighborhoods. “Mass surveillance of entire communities or city blocks raises serious questions about data privacy and potential violations of civil liberties,” the letter stated — language that closely mirrors the framing Tlaib used in her Flock post months later.
The congresswoman has also pushed structural changes aimed at reining in the broader expansion of federal enforcement and surveillance powers. As part of a package of 26 amendments she introduced to the National Defense Authorization Act, Tlaib included a provision to ban the Department of Defense from providing personnel, aircraft, vehicles or other property for use in ICE deportation flights, part of what her office described as an effort to “rein in ICE” and “stop the expansion of AI data centers” tied to enforcement infrastructure.
Her record on surveillance and privacy predates the current fight over Flock by several years. Tlaib has previously joined colleagues including Reps. Mark Pocan and Ilhan Omar in requesting an investigation into the U.S. military’s purchase of location data harvested from Muslim prayer and dating apps, arguing at the time that “it is imperative that every American citizen, no matter their ethnicity or religion, is certain their Fourth and First Amendment rights are not only protected, but equally enforced.” She has also introduced legislation aimed at strengthening protections for whistleblowers and journalists under the Espionage Act, an effort that drew public support from Pentagon Papers source Daniel Ellsberg before his death in 2023.
Tlaib, a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and an informal grouping of progressive lawmakers known as “the Squad,” has represented Michigan’s 12th Congressional District, which includes much of Detroit, since 2019. She was the first Palestinian American woman elected to Congress and has built a legislative identity substantially centered on civil liberties, immigrants’ rights and government accountability.
The scale of Flock’s operations has made it a flashpoint well beyond Tlaib’s district. The ACLU has launched a campaign it calls “Get the Flock Out,” estimating that between 80,000 and 100,000 Flock devices are now active nationwide. In Denver, City Council member Sarah Parady said the city’s mayor signed an initial contract with Flock that did not require council approval, allowing a pilot program to begin with minimal public awareness — a pattern of limited oversight that echoes complaints raised by local officials in other jurisdictions where Flock cameras have been installed.
Tlaib’s post did not detail specific legislative next steps regarding Flock itself, but it arrived amid a broader wave of congressional and local pushback against the company, including moves by some cities to cancel their Flock contracts outright and, separately, a bill introduced in Congress days later by Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett seeking to bar federal grant funds from being used to purchase Flock-style camera systems — a rare instance of bipartisan alarm, even if for different underlying reasons, over the same surveillance technology.
For now, Tlaib’s warning that Flock’s scale of monitoring “should terrify everyone” stands as one of the most direct statements yet from a sitting member of Congress connecting a private company’s commercial surveillance network to the federal government’s immigration enforcement apparatus, a link that is likely to remain contested as lawmakers, city councils and civil liberties groups continue to press for greater transparency into how the data is used and who is allowed to search it.