On June 15, 2025, the Orlando Sentinel reported on data showing that Florida’s highway patrol had used Flock Safety’s surveillance network for immigration-related purposes over 250 times (archive link) between March 13 and May 5.
The Orlando Sentinel quoted reporting from 404Media, which said that the searches had been done “either at the behest of the federal government or as an ‘informal’ favor to federal law enforcement.”
The Flock data analysis was done by Suncoast Searchlight (archive link), using a large dataset of national Flock search activity that had been obtained a few days prior.
Suncoast Searchlight also provided further detail on how they did the data analysis (archive link) that led to the reporting, which includes the keywords they searched for in the data as well as a brief overview of how Flock searches work.
Unlike states like Oregon, California, or Illinois, Florida has no prohibition against this form of data sharing with federal agencies, so Florida law enforcement is able to run these searches on behalf of federal agencies without hiding their activities the way they do in other states.