ICE and SB34 in El Cajon, CA (Feb 2026)

These records were produced on February 26, 2026, in response to a request filed February 1, 2026 by Eva Tang through MuckRock.

Tang requested “all requests for Flock data sent to Mountain View CA PD, including reasons for each query.”

El Cajon’s response notes that “the Flock system does not allow us to filter/extract the data in a way that you are asking” and directed Tang to contact Mountain View CA PD directly if the full network and org audits did not meet her needs.

El Cajon then provided organization audit logs and network logs covering July 2023 through mid-January 2026 — roughly 30 months of continuous data across both audit types.

California attorney general Rob Bonta sued the City of El Cajon in October 2025, alleging that its sharing of ALPR data with non-California agencies violates California’s SB 34 ALPR law.^[1]

El Cajon CA PD — Org Audit

• Type: Org audit
• Timespan: Jul 2023 – Jan 2026 MTD
• Records: 46,371
• Organizations: 1 (El Cajon CA PD)

Across all 46,371 records, every reason and every license plate has been redacted — 0% disclosure on both fields. Case numbers are partially present: the 2023–2024 records contain no case numbers at all, while records from 2025 onward include a case number on approximately 79% of searches.

Search volume roughly doubled over the period, from around 900–1,600 searches per month in 2023 through mid-2024, to 1,500–2,900 per month from early 2025 onward — with a peak of 2,881 in April 2025.

Operator activity

The department’s active operator count was consistent throughout, typically 52–82 users per month. The increase in total search volume is largely driven by per-operator intensity: average searches per user climbed from the mid-teens in 2023 to a peak of ~41 in April 2025, before pulling back to the mid-twenties by end of year.

El Cajon CA PD — Network Audit

• Type: Network audit
• Timespan: Jul 2023 – Jan 2026 MTD
• Rows: ~16.5M

The network audit shows which agencies searched El Cajon data. Searches are classified by the state found in the searching agency’s name: California agencies, agencies from other states, and organizations whose name doesn’t contain a recognizable state.^[2]

Searching Agencies

The organization count charts show how many separate agencies appeared in each month’s network rows. Through March 2025, El Cajon’s network was accessed by roughly 3,000–3,500 distinct agencies per month — overwhelmingly out-of-state. In April 2025, that count collapsed from 3,469 to 558.

Although agencies like NCRIC appear to have heeded the AG’s earlier warning and removed themselves from the nationwide network by May 2024, El Cajon remained on the network.

The March 2025 cutoff — also visible in Santa Cruz’s data — most likely marks when Flock disabled the nationwide network for California customers. It coincides with a shifting political calculus around federal data sharing.

What out-of-state agencies remain after that point are likely El Cajon’s 1:1 connections.

Network search types

The network audit records how each query was initiated. The four types are:

• Search — scans a configurable time window for matching plates (1:1)
• Lookup — queries a specific plate by value (statewide/national)
• Convoy — tracks multiple plates traveling together
• Other — visual confirmation, freeform, and similar low-volume types

Through early 2024, lookup dominated — roughly 55–65% of rows. The two types converged through late 2024 and early 2025, with search surging to ~80% of rows in May–June 2025 before lookup reasserted sharply in July 2025 and has remained dominant since, at roughly 80–85%.

The July 2025 flip coincides with the broader drop in search volume seen across California agencies that month — possibly indicating a platform-level change in how queries were routed or logged.

Convoy searches, where the system looks for vehicles travelling together, are a small but consistent share of activity, running 300–500 rows per month in 2023 and growing to 2,000–4,000 rows per month through 2025 — roughly 0.3–0.5% of total rows throughout the period.

ICE, and more ICE

El Cajon’s org audit redacts both reasons and license plates from every record. But case numbers tell their own story — and several agencies appear to have typed their reasons into the wrong field.

One of those agencies was the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office (SBCSO), which entered “ice protests 2025” as the case number for a June 2025 search. While immigration-related searches from these counties have previously been reported, and SBCSO’s search for “no king” has also been documented, the sheriff’s apparent targeting of anti-ICE protestors appears to have escaped notice.

The search touched 830 networks and 15,151 devices. Flock and every agency in that network either didn’t notice, or didn’t care.

That same month, Riverside County enters “ICE SW 062925” as a case number, possibly referring to a search warrant used for immigration enforcement — the context is unclear without the reason field.

Garden Grove, Menifee, and Hermosa Beach ran several searches referencing HSI, with Garden Grove specifically referencing “LA 2025”:

While those were California agencies doing searches within California, El Cajon’s 1:1 sharing agreements also allow out of state agencies to access the data more directly.

In July 2025, Florida Highway Patrol did a series of searches where it entered “ICE INVESTIGATION”, “ICE ASSIST”, and “ICE Case” into the case number field—searches that are perfectly legal in Florida, but not in California.

Finally, El Cajon itself appears to have run searches on HSI’s behalf — an apparent SB 34/54 violation in its own right, separate from the access it granted to out-of-state agencies.

One incident references a HSI case number, another specifies ‘STONEGARDEN’ as as both the reason and the case number—Operation Stonegarden (OPSG) “supports enhanced cooperation and coordination among Customs and Border Protection (CBP)/United States Border Patrol (USBP), and federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement agencies to strengthen border security.”

The “STONEGARDEN” search also appeared in the December Arkansas logs.^[3] But because Flock—despite its talk of transparency—does not provide the master ledger, the network log files from El Cajon are the only way the public and state and local elected officials can confirm that out-of-state agencies have been directly using data gathered by cameras in El Cajon for immigration enforcement purposes.

Of course, Flock knew this all along but allows it to continue, firmly asserting that violating the law is “a local decision, not Flock’s decision.” If you’re a cop, that is.

Redaction without Reason

El Cajon’s redactions deserve a mention. Of course, the entire discussion of ICE above is based on the “case number” field. El Cajon tried to hide its violations, but failed to account for data being entered into the wrong field. It’s worth noting again that less than 10% of searches have a case number entered, the vast majority of which are not mistaken copy-pastes.

El Cajon PD cites two categories of exemptions to justify its partially-failed attempt at hiding evidence from the public:

1. Under Government Code §§7923.600–7923.625, investigatory and intelligence files compiled for law enforcement purposes are withheld.
2. Under California Constitution art. I §1, U.S. Constitution amend. XIV, and Government Code §§ 7927.700, 7927.705, 6254.29, 7922.000, and 7922.540(a), personal information — including phone numbers, addresses, financial account numbers, and email addresses — is withheld on the grounds that the public interest in non-disclosure outweighs disclosure.

The letter does not identify which specific fields were withheld, explain the basis for each redaction, or quantify how many records or fields were affected.

License plates and search reasons — the fields of primary public interest — are absent from every record without acknowledgment.

El Cajon Asserts a Right to Privacy

El Cajon’s use of the Fourteenth Amendment as a basis for redacting search logs is an act of brazen constitutional irony for an agency that plays fast and loose with state protections of that right.

These are the same logs that, in other jurisdictions, have revealed a Texas sheriff conducting a cross-country “death investigation” that was in fact a search related to abortion — one where officers consulted prosecutors about filing charges the same day they ran the Flock query.

Both the sheriff and Flock publicly dismissed the reporting as “clickbait” and “misinformation.” As the EFF later noted, after obtaining court records: “The only misinformation came from the company and the sheriff trying to cover their tracks.”

The Fourteenth Amendment’s privacy right famously undergirded Roe v. Wade. El Cajon now invokes it to ensure its violations of that same constitutional right remain hidden.