Your city is a sanctuary jurisdiction.

Sanctuary policies vary by jurisdiction. The common thread is a legal commitment that local police will not actively cooperate with federal civil immigration enforcement. Some sanctuary policies prohibit sharing immigration status. Some prohibit honoring ICE detainers. Some prohibit any voluntary information sharing with ICE at all.

Most sanctuary policies regulate what your police department does with the data they collect. They were written before private data brokers became the dominant clearinghouse for police records.

The structural workaround

When a local department signs an Accurint Virtual Crime Center contract, they aren’t sharing data with ICE. They’re sharing data with LexisNexis. LexisNexis, in turn, sells access to its data products to ICE under a separate federal contract. Local police never sent anything to ICE. Federal civil immigration enforcement received the data anyway.

We call this data laundering. It is not illegal — most sanctuary policies don’t regulate the sale of data to a third party that subsequently resells to federal buyers. That omission is the gap.

The opt-out lie

LexisNexis publishes a consumer opt-out form. Filing it removes you from LexisNexis’s consumer products. The policy explicitly states that the opt-out does not apply to law enforcement or government products. The data PSDEX holds about you, as a witness or victim, is not affected by the consumer opt-out.

What changes this

Two things, at the local level: a sanctuary ordinance update that explicitly covers third-party data sales, and a procurement policy that requires council review of data-broker agreements. The action page has draft language for both.