Immigration Enforcement Is Searching North Carolina’s Flock Cameras — 2,698 Times, in Our Own Records

A Houston physician, Dr. Jake Kushner, recently used an unredacted Flock record from Weber County, Utah to show that the Houston Police Department ran 1.9 million searches of the national plate-reader network, 108 of them explicitly labeled “immigration” in 2025. His work prompted an obvious question for us: does the same thing show up in North Carolina’s records? So we went back and read every unredacted network audit we have obtained — from Carolina Beach, Kure Beach, UNC Pembroke, NC A&T, Whiteville, and Western Carolina — a combined 12.4 million search-to-camera exposures, roughly 3.9 million distinct searches. The answer is yes, and it is specific.

2,698 immigration-labeled searches reached North Carolina’s cameras

Across those six agencies’ audits, 2,698 distinct searches carried a stated reason that named immigration — typed into the system by the officer running the query. They break down like this:

The reason strings are not ambiguous. They read “Immigration (criminal),” “Immigration (civil/administrative),” “Immigration (criminal) – I.C.E.,” and “Immigration (civil/administrative) – redacted.” These are the searching officers’ own words about why they reached into a camera in Whiteville, or Pembroke, or Carolina Beach.

The 833 that should stop a reader cold

Criminal-immigration searches are troubling enough. But 833 of these searches were labeled “civil/administrative” — which in immigration practice means not a crime at all, but civil removal: deportation. An automated license-plate network, built and sold to North Carolina towns for stolen cars and missing persons, was queried hundreds of times for civil immigration enforcement against the cameras those towns pay for. Nothing in North Carolina’s ALPR statute contemplates that use, and Flock’s own written policy claims to bar it.

The biggest searcher of North Carolina’s cameras labeled nothing

Here is the honest turn, and it matters. The single largest searcher of North Carolina’s cameras in these audits is, once again, the Houston Police Department — 315,285 distinct searches. But not one of Houston’s North Carolina searches carried an immigration label. In fact most carried no stated reason at all — which is exactly what Dr. Kushner found in the Utah data: the overwhelming majority of HPD’s searches are run with no justification recorded, and only a sliver are ever labeled. So Houston is the volume story — a department a thousand miles away searching our cameras hundreds of thousands of times — while the documented immigration story in North Carolina belongs to a different set of agencies, almost all of them out of state: the Florida Highway Patrol (377 immigration searches), Florida Fish & Wildlife (270), Sevierville, Tennessee PD (215), and sheriffs in Kansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Missouri, and Indiana. We will not conflate the two: Houston’s immigration intent is documented in Utah’s records, not in ours.

This is a floor — and New Hanover hides its copy of it

2,698 is not the statewide number; it is only what six agencies’ audits reveal. It does not include Appalachian State’s 1.5-million-search audit, and it cannot include the largest local record of all: the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office’s 2,980,082-line audit, which carries the same “Reason” field — but which the County produced with the searching agency redacted on every line. The immigration searches are almost certainly in there too. We simply are not allowed to see who ran them. That is the whole point: Utah could count its immigration searches because Utah left the record intact; North Carolina’s largest holder of this data chose the opposite. A sheriff’s policy that lists “Immigration Violator” as a hotlist category is a warning on paper. These 2,698 searches are the thing itself, on the record, in our own state.

Method & sources: DeFlockILM combined every unredacted Flock Network Audit produced by six North Carolina agencies — Carolina Beach, Kure Beach PD, UNC Pembroke PD, NC A&T University PD, Whiteville PD, and Western Carolina University PD — totaling ~12.4 million search-to-camera rows, deduplicated on Flock’s unique search ID to ~3.9 million distinct searches. “Immigration-labeled” counts distinct searches whose officer-entered Reason field contains the word “immigration.” Counts are a floor: they exclude Appalachian State’s audit (produced in a non-CSV format) and the New Hanover County audit (searching-agency field redacted). The national context — the Houston Police Department’s 1.9 million searches and its 2025 immigration-labeled inquiries — comes from Dr. Jake Kushner’s forensic analysis of the Weber County, Utah Flock records and his Aug. 25, 2026 Houston City Council testimony. The separate figure of “more than 4,000 immigration-related lookups” reported elsewhere is a national total from 404 Media’s reporting on Danville, Illinois records, not a North Carolina figure. Every underlying NC audit is preserved on the Internet Archive and linked from our records hub. This page reports on public records; the reasons quoted are the searching officers’ own entries.