Cities Are Forced to Funnel License Plate Data to a Federal Surveillance Program

The Trump administration uses the HIDTA grant program to require cities to transmit ALPR data to federal servers. HIDTA aggregates data from local vendors like Flock and Axon. The aggregated data is shared with federal, state, and local agencies and sometimes forwarded to the DEA’s NLPRP. This bypasses local oversight and eliminates direct vendor contracts.