The Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO published an excellent article, “Fed’s hidden immigration weapon: Virginia’s surveillance network“, on July 3, 2025 ^{(archive link)}.

The article exposes data sharing between five county police departments in Virginia and federal authorities on a variety of cases, including immigration. The journalists’ investigation was based upon earlier data collected from research in Illinois that revealed over 4,000 cases of Flock data sharing with federal agencies across the country.

This is a widespread form of backdoor access to Flock surveillance systems by federal agencies, as shown by the numerous similar articles we have collected here.

WHRO’s article includes several statements from their police agencies, clarifies some common misunderstandings of Flock’s technology, and discusses Virginia’s new ALPR law.

Virginia’s new ALPR law notably adds guardrails to how data from surveillance systems like Flock is used, while also ensuring that further abuses of these systems won’t be revealed, because it exempts audit logs from public records requests — the very same kind of public records requests that revealed these systematic abuses to begin with.