Last week the City of Kyle, a fast-growing Austin suburb, interrupted a string of recent victories won by local activists to thwart the further expansion of police surveillance technology across Central Texas.
On April 21, council members overwhelmingly voted 6-1 to authorize the Kyle Police Department to apply for another state grant—worth up to $381,200—to continue funding at least 38 preexisting Flock Safety automated license plate readers (ALPRs).
Most of the local residents in attendance who spoke on the issue opposed the city’s move to obtain further funding for the artificial intelligence-powered network of surveillance cameras. “There’s one cell-phone tower within a mile of my house, and there’s four Flock cameras. You need a warrant to check my cell site records, but you have more granular data from the cameras than you do from [the cell tower],” David Moss, a Kyle resident, told the city council at the meeting.
Flock has sold nearly 92,000 such cameras to local police departments across the nation—including more than 10,000 in Texas, according to an open source map of the cameras compiled by DeFlock. The City of Kyle has had them since 2024. The cameras record the license plate numbers of trafficking motorists going about their daily routines and store immense logs of surveillance data that can be queried by participating law enforcement agencies across the nation. The records are stored for at least 30 days before being deleted, except in cases in which the data is pulled from the system for investigative purposes.
Downtown Kyle in 2020 (Shutterstock)
Flock has come under fire from privacy advocates as well as local activists concerned about surveillance technology for allowing law enforcement agencies to conduct unrestricted searches of its data—including for the purposes of immigration enforcement and, in at least one instance, an abortion investigation.
Flock Media Relations Manager Evan White told the Texas Observer that while the company doesn’t work directly with U.S. Customs and Border Protection or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), “Agencies choose with whom to share data and can change or revoke their sharing settings at any point.”
Kyle City Council member Claudia Zapata was the lone vote against the grant application. “The fact that we have definitive proof that not only Texas DPS, but agencies across the nation, have tracked our system and used it in order to enforce immigration is, to me, disgusting,” she told the Observer, referring to the Department of Public Safety by its initials. “Some of [my colleagues], not all of them, vocally say that they care about immigrants, yet here is a tool that is being used to create a faster pipeline for their deportation, and they’re still for it.”
Council member Melisa Medina, who voted in favor of applying for a new Flock grant, said at a prior meeting that, “If something were to happen to [my daughter] I would definitely want that technology available, to be able to find that person.”
According to Zapata, Kyle’s internal ALPR policy does not mandate that an officer have reasonable suspicion or probable cause to conduct a search of the city’s Flock data.
Kyle Police Chief Jeff Barnett told council members that officers need only a “valid investigative reason” to conduct searches of the department’s ALPR data. The searches are “logged indefinitely, which allows for regular audits and to ensure our staff are using it in a proper manner,” he said.
According to audit logs of the city’s Flock system reviewed by the Observer, the Kyle Police Department searched its own ALPR data at least 2,891 times from January through March of this year. The audit logs also show police from 18 other agencies across 10 states conducted at least 117 searches of Kyle’s Flock data that were related to immigration enforcement this year, with well over half of the searches flagged as “ICE.”
The Kyle audit logs also show that DPS conducted at least 10 immigration-related searches flagged as “civil and/or administrative,” which may involve warrants that aren’t signed by a judge. As reported by 404 Media, Texas law enforcement agencies conducted at least 180 searches of ALPR data in connection with immigration enforcement activity from January to May 2025. DPS did not respond to the Observer’s request for comment.
At least 17 other searches of Kyle ALPR data flagged as civil and/or administrative were conducted by out-of-state police departments, mostly from Florida. The logs show hundreds of police agencies have access to the city’s Flock data.
Another query, from January 5, by the local police department in Lebanon, Tennessee, listed “Obstructing Justice – Suspicious female filming traffic stop and making comments about ICE” as the reason for the department’s search of Kyle’s Flock data. Both filming police and speaking out against ICE are protected activities under the First Amendment.
Searches like these are why local municipalities have begun pushing back against the rapid adoption and expansion of such technologies, said Kabbas Azhar, a fellow with the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “In general, the use of Flock currently is completely unregulated,” he told the Observer. Even when cities and states do impose regulations, the Flock system is essentially run on the honor system, Azhar says.
Council member Zapata said she’s concerned about the possibility of the Hays County sheriff, who is a Republican, entering into a task force agreement with ICE (which wouldn’t require approval from the Democratic-controlled commissioners court) and using the city’s Flock data to carry out immigration enforcement.
Under a state law passed during the last legislative session, all county sheriffs must request or enter into a 287(g) agreement with ICE, which deputizes state and local authorities to carry out certain immigration enforcement duties, by December 1. Last year, DPS entered into a task force agreement—the most expansive type of 287(g) arrangement—that effectively deputizes state troopers to act as federal immigration agents. DPS has been particularly aggressive in expanding its arsenal of AI-powered surveillance technology in recent years.
Last year, DPS entered into a $26-million contract with Flock. (The state then also fined Flock earlier this year for operating without a license in violation of state law.)
Additionally, anti-surveillance activists remain concerned about how the data is being used in abortion investigations in a state that has largely outlawed the procedure. Last May, for instance, 404 Media reported that the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in North Texas had entered “had an abortion, search for female” as the reason for conducting a nationwide search of Flock cameras. Despite the local officers’ attempt to frame the search as a welfare check, an affidavit obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) confirmed deputies initiated the search as part of a “death investigation” of a “non-viable fetus.”
While Kyle has moved to maintain its surveillance infrastructure, other jurisdictions in the region have cut off Flock Safety and other similar tech—thanks in part to organizing led by a “No ALPRs” community coalition featuring over 30 state and local organizations.
In June, San Marcos and Austin voted against the rapid uptake of ALPRs. While San Marcos voted to block a further expansion of its Flock camera network, Austin completely did away with more than 540 Axon and Flock ALPR cameras after the coalition pressured the city to hit the brakes. In October, Lockhart voted against a proposal to enter into a contract with Flock for seven new ALPRs after similar community pushback. Hays County, where Kyle is located, quickly followed suit, becoming the first county in the state to end its contract, which was for at least six Flock cameras.
In February, however, DPS began essentially overriding the local decisions of Austin and others by installing several Flock cameras within state rights-of-way along the highway after receiving authorization from the Texas Department of Transportation. An investigation by KUT also found that the Austin Police Department has continued to search Flock ALPR data stored by neighboring police departments in Round Rock and Sunset Valley.
Nationally, at least 61 cities have rejected the use of ALPRs, by either terminating contracts or halting further expansions of the technology, according to DeFlock.
Mackenzie Rhine, a digital rights attorney and EFF board member, told the Observer that the Austin anti-ALPRs coalition is targeting other types of surveillance in the city and elsewhere—like AI-powered security cameras in parks—while also looking at taking the anti-surveillance fight to the state legislature next session.
The coalition is working to develop model state policy based off of Austin’s Transparent and Responsible Use of Surveillance Technology (TRUST) Act, which establishes a framework for how city departments adopt surveillance technologies and guides internal transparency and accountability measures, including restrictions on data retention and sharing and requirements to audit and report how such technologies are being used.
Last session, state lawmakers took steps toward regulation of AI-powered surveillance technology in passing the Texas Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act, which established the AI Advisory Council to review state agencies’ use of such tech. There were also bills filed to reign in police’s use of ALPRs, but none gained any traction.
The coalition is now trying to expand its reach by partnering with new members who might be better positioned to communicate privacy concerns to the Republican-dominated legislature. That includes Travis County Libertarian Party Chair Austin Whaley, who, with the coalition, is considering pushing a state constitutional amendment with TRUST Act-like provisions that would require companies like Flock to consider privacy protections in their contracts, including addressing data-sharing agreements with third parties.
Despite the Kyle City Council’s vote to fund Flock cameras last week, Zapata said she’ll continue to work with like-minded representatives in other cities to combat the expansion of surveillance tech. But she also thinks that there ultimately needs to be a statewide legislative response.
“There is so much information that is collected off of these [ALPRs] that is just being funneled into big, expanding surveillance networks,” Zapata said. “It’s something that definitely has to be fought at the state level.”
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