Start with the sentence that should stop you cold. In May 2025, a Texas sheriff's office searched the data of more than 83,000 automatic license-plate cameras across the country — looking for a woman who had allegedly ended her own pregnancy. The network it used reaches into states where abortion is legal. It reaches into Minnesota.
That is not a dystopian hypothetical. It is a logged search, uncovered through public records, reported by 404 Media. And it is the clearest possible illustration of what these camera networks actually are: not a tool your town controls, but a door your town leaves open to every other jurisdiction in America.
Then it came home. And here is the part I want you to sit with, because it cuts against the easy story: the reason we know what happened in Minnesota is that Minnesota has one of the strongest surveillance-transparency laws in the country. The problem and the proof come from the same statute.
What happened in our own suburbs
In July 2026, the Star Tribune requested the audit logs that Minnesota law requires every police department to keep for these cameras. What those logs showed: about 30 state, county, and federal agencies searched license-plate data in at least eight Twin Cities suburbs for immigration enforcement between November and March — during Operation Metro Surge, the winter ICE crackdown documented earlier in this series.
The specifics are worse than the summary:
- Fridley's six cameras were searched more than 390,000 times in a single month by agencies around the country.
- The Mille Lacs County Sheriff's Office, which has an agreement to work alongside ICE, searched cameras in Fridley, Eagan, South St. Paul, Crystal, Robbinsdale, and Brooklyn Center for civil immigration purposes.
- Police in Raleigh, North Carolina searched Fridley's cameras with the logged reason "immigration." The U.S. Postal Inspection Service ran immigration searches. And FBI agents in Indianapolis searched a Minnesota suburb's cameras using a "guest" account on another city's system — an account Flock says it doesn't allow, and removed the day after a reporter asked about it.
Sixty Minnesota law-enforcement agencies have signed Flock contracts. Some share tightly: Faribault restricts access to its own county 911 center. Others share with the whole country: Stillwater and New Brighton grant access to hundreds of agencies including out-of-state ones. As the ACLU of Minnesota put it, once a department grants access, "local police have limited control."
And a detail that should bother anyone who cares about the rule of law regardless of politics: the Star Tribune found many searches ran with "vague reasons, or sometimes none at all — despite state law requiring a justification for every search." The safeguard exists. It was being ignored.
Why Minnesota's law is the hero and the map at the same time
Minnesota passed its ALPR statute — Minn. Stat. § 13.824 — in 2015, and it is genuinely good. It bars a central state database of plate scans. It requires non-hit data to be destroyed within 60 days. It requires a logged, reasonable-suspicion justification for every single search. It requires a public audit trail and biennial audits. It requires the state to publish the list of every agency using these cameras and where the fixed ones are. Roughly 115 Minnesota agencies appear on that public list right now.
Every fact in the section above exists because that law forced it into the open. No other kind of statute produces that. This is the affirmative case for Minnesota-style transparency, and I'd make it to anyone: sunlight is why the abuse became a scandal instead of a secret.
But the same reading of the statute shows exactly where it stops short, and the gaps are precise:
- It doesn't bar sharing with federal or out-of-state agencies. The law lets a Minnesota department share with any "law enforcement agency." That single undefined phrase is how a Fridley camera ends up answering to Indianapolis and Raleigh.
- It barely reaches private camera networks. The statute covers a non-government reader only "to the extent that data collected by the reader are shared with a law enforcement agency." A purely private Flock network — a shopping center, an HOA, a repo company building its own movement database — sits almost entirely outside it.
- It doesn't regulate the vendor. Flock retains the data, builds the national lookup tool, and makes the product decisions. When asked about the immigration searches, the company's spokesman said civil immigration searches are "allowed under Minnesota law" and that working with federal agencies is "not Flock's decision." Minnesota's statute points at police departments. The company holding the data is barely in frame.
The company, and the scale
This is not a few cameras on a few poles. By the ACLU's count, Flock operates more than 120,000 cameras in at least 6,000 American cities. A single "nationwide" search, like the Texas abortion case, can sweep 80,000-plus of them at once. Federal Customs and Border Protection had access to more than 80,000 through "pilot" arrangements — and one police department, according to the reporting, "did not know or understand that it was sharing data with CBP."
The company has spent 2025 and 2026 reacting to disclosure after disclosure: pulling some states out of its national tool, pausing federal pilots, cutting its default data retention from 30 days to 7, making search reasons mandatory that had been optional until mid-2025. Two U.S. senators and a House member have opened investigations. The ACLU's assessment of the retention change is worth quoting because it names the real problem: even at 7 days, "roughly 90 percent of all searches happen within a week of collection" — so a shorter retention window changes very little about the surveillance that actually occurs.
What Minnesotans did about it — this is the encouraging part
Here is where I get to tell you something good, because Minnesota communities did not wait.
Since the Star Tribune investigation, the list of Minnesota cities and counties that have ended, suspended, or refused to renew Flock contracts has passed a dozen: Columbia Heights (whose council covered the cameras in black plastic bags before voting them out), Brooklyn Park, West St. Paul, Duluth — the largest city in the state to do it — St. Paul, Sherburne County, North Branch, Winona, St. Louis County, and more. Others amended their contracts to bar federal sharing and immigration searches outright. A Sherburne County commander said it plainly: "We put a high value on our relationship with the people in the communities we serve. We don't want to erode the trust."
That is federalism and local control working the way they're supposed to — Minnesota communities deciding, in public, what surveillance they will and won't accept. It's the same principle this campaign keeps coming back to: the power belongs closest to the people, and the people, given the facts, made a choice.
One honest note, because the standard runs both ways: these cameras do help solve some crimes, and the officers who use them lawfully are not villains. A Hopkins police captain gave the most credible version of the pro-camera position — "It's a criminal investigative tool, not a civil enforcement mechanism. I believe state law is pretty clear on that." He's right about what the law intends. The scandal is that the tool was pointed at things it was never meant for, by people the buying city never authorized.
The data-broker shadow behind all of it
License plates are just the visible edge. The same economy that monetizes your movements runs on data brokers, and the enforcement record shows it's not speculative:
The FTC has cracked down on companies selling precise location data — X-Mode and InMarket in January 2024, Gravy Analytics and Mobilewalla in December 2024. Then in January 2025, Gravy Analytics was breached, exposing millions of location pings. Reporters found automakers quietly selling drivers' second-by-second driving behavior to data brokers who sold it to insurers; General Motors stopped after the reporting, and now faces suits from the FTC and state attorneys general. The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed a rule to rein data brokers in — and withdrew it in May 2025.
That's the pattern this series keeps documenting: a federal protection proposed, then abandoned, leaving the states as the only line left.
Minnesota's other new tool — and its blind spot
Minnesota does now have a comprehensive consumer data privacy law, in effect since July 31, 2025 (Minn. Stat. §§ 325M.10–.21). It's real, and parts of it are genuinely ahead of other states: a right to question an automated decision made about you, a right to the list of specific third parties your data went to, a requirement that companies keep an inventory of the data they hold, and treatment of precise location and immigration status as "sensitive data" requiring consent.
But read the fine print — the thing this series exists to do — and you find the blind spot. The law categorically exempts government entities. So it does not touch police license-plate collection at all. And because Flock acts as a government contractor when it works for a city, that stream mostly escapes too. A driver photographed by a private Flock camera has, in practice, no notice, no consent, and — because the law creates no private right of action — no way to enforce anything personally. The Attorney General is the only cop on this beat, and as of now there's little public sign of enforcement.
Between the ALPR statute that stops at police-shared data and a privacy law that stops at the government's door, a purely private movement-tracking network sits in a regulatory dead zone. That's not an argument against either law. It's a map of the two-foot gap between them that a $4.8 billion company is standing in.
What we can do
Minnesota is closer to getting this right than almost any state, which means the fixes are specific rather than sweeping:
Close the sharing loophole. A Minnesota camera should answer to Minnesota. Require a court order before any department shares ALPR data with a federal or out-of-state agency — exactly the bill Rep. Tabke introduced, which died in committee and returns in 2027. That single change would have stopped almost everything in the Star Tribune's investigation.
Bar the civil-immigration and reproductive-care searches by statute, not by contract. Some cities already did it in their own contracts. It shouldn't depend on which suburb you drive through.
Reach the private networks. Extend § 13.824 — or the privacy law — to private ALPR networks that build movement databases, whether or not they've signed a police contract. The dead zone is a choice we can un-make.
Regulate the vendor, not just the buyer. The company that retains the data and builds the lookup tool should be bound by Minnesota law directly — retention limits, an audit it can't grade itself, and a flat prohibition on selling or repurposing Minnesotans' movement data.
And fund the enforcer. A privacy law with no enforcement is the fine-print problem again: a right on paper that produces no cases. The Attorney General's office asked for attorneys and an investigator to enforce the new law. Give them the tools, then hold them to a published record.
I ran for this office on the idea that the government should treat every Minnesotan's dignity as if it mattered — and there is nothing more basic to dignity than being able to drive to a doctor, a church, a lawyer, or a protest without a private company building a searchable map of everywhere you've been and renting it to whoever asks.
Minnesota built the flashlight that found this. Now we finish the job the flashlight started.
First the facts. Then the fix.
Sources
Minn. Stat. § 13.824 (Minnesota's automatic license-plate-reader law: the 60-day destruction requirement, the logged-justification and reasonable-suspicion requirements, the ban on a central state repository, the biennial audits, and the public agency list), verified verbatim against raw text at revisor.mn.gov; the BCA's published list of agencies using license-plate readers under subdivision 8. Minn. Stat. §§ 325M.10–.21, the Minnesota Consumer Data Privacy Act (effective July 31, 2025; the government-entity exemption at § 325M.12, the consumer rights and profiling-question right at § 325M.14, the data-inventory and sensitive-data-consent duties at § 325M.16, the AG-only enforcement and no-private-right-of-action at § 325M.20, and the January 31, 2026 sunset of the cure period), verified against the Revisor. Allison Kite and Sarah Ritter, "Police searched Twin Cities license plate cameras for immigration enforcement during ICE surge," Minnesota Star Tribune (July 20, 2026) — the 30-agency figure, the Mille Lacs County searches, the Fridley 390,000-search and out-of-state/FBI-guest-account findings, and the note that searches ran without the required justification. Katelyn Vue, Sahan Journal (Aug. 18, 2026) — the 59-agency Minnesota footprint and the Anoka County contract priced below the board-approval threshold. KSTP (Aug. 19, 2026) on the range of sharing breadth across Minnesota agencies. Star Tribune (Aug. 26, 2026) and MPR News, Pioneer Press, Duluth News Tribune, and CBS News coverage (June–Aug. 2026) on the Minnesota communities ending, suspending, or refusing Flock contracts, with the quoted officials. 404 Media reporting by Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox: the ICE side-door lookups from Danville, Illinois audit logs (May 27, 2025), the Texas 83,000-camera abortion search (May 29, 2025), Flock's removal of states from its national tool (June 25, 2025), and CBP's access to 80,000+ cameras (Aug. 25, 2025). ACLU, "Despite 'New' Updates, Flock's Creepy Cameras Remain Major Civil Liberties Threat" (Aug. 13, 2026) — the 120,000-camera/6,000-city scale and the retention-change analysis. Congressional investigations by Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (Aug. 2025), Sen. Ron Wyden (Oct. 2025 letter), and Sen. Josh Hawley (Aug. 2026). Data-broker enforcement: FTC actions against X-Mode/Outlogic and InMarket (Jan. 2024) and Gravy Analytics/Venntel and Mobilewalla (Dec. 2024); the January 2025 Gravy Analytics breach; Kashmir Hill's New York Times reporting on GM/LexisNexis driving data (March 2024), GM's halt, and the resulting FTC and state actions; the CFPB's proposed data-broker rule (Dec. 2024) and its withdrawal (May 15, 2025). Carpenter v. United States, 138 S. Ct. 2206 (2018). Minnesota Reformer (July 28, 2025) on the privacy law's effective date and the Attorney General's enforcement plans.
Two names in the source material require confirmation before formal citation and are described rather than named here: the Johnson County, Texas sheriff in the abortion-search case, and Flock's chief executive. Several syndicated links were mirror copies flagged for replacement with originals. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.