This story was published in partnership with New York Focus, an independent, investigative news site covering New York state and city politics. Sign up for their newsletter here.
As President Donald Trump’s administration rounds up hundreds of immigrants it claims are gang members and expels them to a notorious Salvadoran prison, New York state is quietly feeding federal authorities gang intelligence that could fuel the administration’s rapidly expanding, extrajudicial deportation machine.
The New York State Police maintain a database of more than 5,100 people they’ve designated as members of criminal gangs — and funnel the information into a federal database used by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a New York Focus investigation has found.
The statewide gang database has been in operation for 20 years, though it has garnered almost no outside attention or scrutiny. State Police staff designate people as gang members — including people who may never have been charged with a crime — using highly speculative criteria like where they spend their time, whom they talk to, what clothing they wear, and what tattoos they have.
Any law enforcement agency in the state can submit entries to the database, a State Police spokesperson said. As officers and analysts add names, State Police staff also submit them to a federal gang file that feeds directly into ICE’s main case management tool.
The statewide gang database currently contains 225 alleged criminal gangs, the spokesperson said. It has not been audited by an outside entity.
Though the statewide database has been shared with ICE for roughly two decades, the arrangement is now exploitable by an agency freed from regard for due process. The Trump administration has used alleged ties to a transnational gang to justify a mass rendition campaign that has seen hundreds of Venezuelan men, including many who appear not to be connected to the gang, flown to a brutal Salvadoran prison. That crackdown has relied on intelligence similar to what the State Police have historically used to identify supposed gang members.
Meanwhile, the New York City Council and police department are sparring over legislation that would abolish the NYPD’s gang database, which critics have long decried as driving racial profiling and over-policing.
The State Police have dodged that kind of scrutiny, even though the statewide gang database, created in 2005, is eight years older than the NYPD’s. It has proliferated under Governor Kathy Hochul, who has funneled millions of dollars in additional funding to State Police intelligence operations in recent years, including hundreds of thousands to beef up gang surveillance and social media monitoring.
Hochul has given mixed, and at times confusing, messages on immigration enforcement. She recently promised to combat Trump’s sweeping deportation campaign, even though some of her favored police initiatives could be facilitating it.
“We’re not going to allow this mass deportation,” the governor said last month. “Individual counties can sign a pact with ICE, and we have a lot of them … but what I control is the State Police, and they will not cooperate in that.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul speaks at Nomad clothing retailer Noir et Blanc alongside district attorneys about her efforts to reform the state’s discovery law, April 16, 2025. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
The State Police don’t publicize the statewide gang database’s existence. The agency’s annual reports only briefly mention the database by its acronym: GRIP, short for the Gang Reporting and Intelligence Program. (That’s not to be confused with the NYPD database of gun violence suspects that goes by the same acronym.)
“I wasn’t aware of it,” said Babe Howell, a gang policing expert and professor at the City University of New York School of Law. Five other New York-based gang policing and police surveillance experts and activists said they didn’t know of a statewide gang database, either.
Gang databases have come under intense scrutiny in recent years, and civil liberties advocates were alarmed that the New York State Police have been operating one under the radar for two decades. Especially alarming is its potential role in immigration enforcement, they said.
“This is really enabling the worst of the abuses that are unfolding right now,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the New York-based Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “Every time New York leaders express outrage at Trump but enable his policies, they are lying to the people of this state. It is hypocrisy in the most rage-inducing form to offer lip service while handing over the names of your own residents to the Trump administration.”
Police say that gang databases play a critical role in “precision policing,” allowing them to efficiently target people and groups engaged in violence or other lawbreaking. In practice, the databases are far from precise.
Most gang databases are highly secretive, but research and reporting on those in New York City, California, Washington, DC, and other large jurisdictions have revealed that they contain widespread errors, encourage racial profiling, include children, and are used to turn low-level infractions into major criminal cases.
Inclusion in a gang database can come with serious consequences. It’s nearly impossible for members of the public to find out whether they’re in most gang databases — let alone challenge their inclusion in them — unless it comes up in court, at which point authorities can use their alleged involvement in organized crime to argue for more severe charges or increased “gang enhancement” sentences. Before making arrests, police use gang databases to target people for surveillance and questioning. Archived State Police reports mention thousands of annual police stops of gang database members — “hits,” as the agency called them.
Law enforcement agencies also use gang databases in federal immigration enforcement. Some of the debate around whether to abolish the NYPD’s gang database centers on whether the department shares the information with ICE, which may happen informally through joint law enforcement task forces or other local-federal partnerships, experts said.
The statewide gang database’s path to ICE is much clearer. The way the State Police share entries with the federal government makes the information almost immediately available to immigration enforcement authorities.
The State Police-run New York State Intelligence Center, or NYSIC, maintains the gang database. One of the country’s oldest so-called fusion centers, it was created in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, domestic surveillance boom to facilitate information-sharing between local, state, and federal law enforcement.
NYSIC adds all of its entries to a federal gang file housed within the FBI-run National Crime Information Center system. The FBI makes National Crime Information Center data available to law enforcement agencies across the country and at every jurisdictional level. ICE accesses it in a number of ways — most readily, through its Investigative Case Management system.
The New York State Police maintain a database of more than 5,100 people they’ve designated as members of criminal gangs — and funnel the information into a federal database used by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a New York Focus investigation has found. Credit: Visualization: New York Focus
Palantir, the data-mining company co-founded by billionaire former Trump adviser Peter Thiel, landed a contract to build the Investigative Case Management system during the Obama administration. The tool became fully operational during Trump’s first term, and Palantir signed a $96 million contract during the Biden administration to expand the system. It’s built to make countless records and databases — including the one to which the State Police uploads its gang database entries — available to ICE staff in a matter of seconds.
As recent press reports have uncovered, the Trump administration uses spurious evidence to label immigrants as gang members. So, too, do the State Police.
Family members of those swept up in the federal rendition campaign to El Salvador’s CECOT prison have told reporters that agents pointed to tattoos of common imagery like crowns and sports logos as evidence of membership in the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, even though gang experts assert that the gang has little presence in the United States and doesn’t rely on tattoos to tout membership. One man said that agents pointed to his tattoo of an autism awareness ribbon to allege his Tren de Aragua involvement.
A 2018 NYSIC “field intelligence report,” uncovered in a trove of hacked documents, asserts that similar ribbons are symbols of MS-13, the Central American gang at the heart of the first Trump administration’s sweeping gang deportation campaign.
“These ribbons resemble those used in common charity campaigns, but rarely include writing or any sign of what the ribbon represents,” the intelligence report states.
Similarly, an ICE document recently uncovered in court proceedings said that wearing clothing with the Air Jordan “Jumpman” and the Chicago Bulls basketball team logo are signs of Tren de Aragua membership. The NYSIC intelligence report said the same of MS-13.
A Maryland police officer now-famously added Kilmar Abrego Garcia — whom the Trump administration mistakenly sent to the CECOT prison — to a since-dismantled gang database during the height of the MS-13 panic in 2019 based on a tip from a confidential information, and because he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a graphic hoodie showing a $100 bill. The officer reported that the clothing was “indicative of the Hispanic gang culture.” Like NYSIC’s gang entries, that flimsy gang designation made its way to the feds, who are holding it up as one of the reasons they’re refusing to bring Abrego Garcia back to the US, in defiance of a court order.
Cases like Abrego Garcia’s highlight the bogus criteria underpinning gang databases across the country, according to Howell, of the CUNY School of Law. “It’s truly a free for all,” she said. “They can name any groups they want as gang members.”
To add to the state gang database, NYSIC has adopted the same criteria required for entries into the federal gang file, the State Police told New York Focus. Those criteria, archived in user manuals published by various local law enforcement agencies in recent years, adhere to the same loose standards that have become the industry norm.
Officers and analysts can add new gangs to the state and federal databases so long as they contain at least three members and are involved in “criminal activity or delinquent conduct,” per the manuals.
The manuals also list the eligible criteria for adding alleged gang members. Staff can label someone a gang member if the person admits to being in a specific gang when they are arrested or sent to prison or jail.
They can also add someone if an “authorized penal organization” identifies them as a gang member. Interagency agreements, obtained by New York Focus via public records requests, show that the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision has contributed intelligence to the statewide gang database since at least 2010, and a department spokesperson confirmed that it still does.
If suspected gang members don’t meet those criteria, staff can label them as such if they meet any two from a more tenuous set of standards. One component of that list involves officers observing suspects frequenting “a known gang’s area,” associating with “known gang members,” and affecting a gang’s “style of dress, tattoos, hand signals, or symbols.”
Officers can also check one of the boxes if an informant “of proven reliability” pegs someone as a gang member — or if an informant “of unknown reliability” says they’re part of a gang and the officer is able to corroborate the tip “in significant respects.”
Other possible components of the two-criteria requirement include being arrested on more than one occasion alongside known gang members for “offenses consistent” with gang activity, as well as admitting membership at any time other than arrest or incarceration.
“These gang databases have been shown to rely on inaccurate and stigmatizing methods of identification,” said Daniel Lambright, senior staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union. “It adds up to being a kind of dragnet form of surveillance of young Black and Latino primarily men.”
Lambright pointed to the fact that, historically, 99 percent of people in the NYPD’s gang database have been Black or Hispanic. The State Police said it did not have a racial breakdown of entries in the statewide gang database.
Asked about the criticism that gang databases use unreliable methods and target racial minorities, the spokesperson responded: “The New York State Police does not agree with this assessment.”
Over the last decade, NYSIC has added roughly 1,000 names a year to its gang database, according to the State Police’s annual reports. That’s down from a high of roughly double that in the mid-2000s, according to old reports archived by criminology professor Brendan McQuade, whose 2019 book Pacifying the Homeland contains the only known mention of the statewide gang database outside of annual reports and internal documents.
Under federal regulations, departments must reevaluate gang database entries at least every five years and purge those that officers can’t re-confirm. The NYSIC database currently contains 5,137 names, the State Police said — just under 40 percent of the size of the NYPD’s roughly 13,300-person gang database. (While they share some information, NYSIC and NYPD intelligence generally work independently, according to McQuade’s research.)
NYSIC has seen an influx of resources in recent years, including for its gang policing. In 2022, Hochul successfully pushed through tens of millions of dollars for new police surveillance and intelligence initiatives in the state budget, including over $500,000 for the NYSIC social media surveillance team to “perform daily analysis of publicly available social media activity related to school violence threats, gang activity, and illegal firearms.” The following year, she doubled down, funneling an additional $700,000 to the social media team for more gang and gun surveillance. Social media monitoring has become the prime way police departments add people to their gang databases.
“Governor Hochul has been clear from the beginning: she believes violent criminals and gang members should be deported, but does not support any attacks on children and families,” a spokesperson for the governor said in a statement. “Recognizing the threat posed by violent gangs, the Governor has invested millions in new law enforcement technology at our northern border and committed additional State Police, counterterrorism investigators, and new intelligence capabilities as part of this year’s budget.”
“New York State has long partnered with federal authorities on multiple task forces in order to keep New Yorkers safe,” the spokesperson said.
A Note on Methodology
This document-based investigation relied on several sources. Inter-agency agreements obtained through public records requests revealed the existence of a statewide gang database. Annual reports both published by the State Police and archived by criminologist Brendan McQuade confirmed that NYSIC shares its submissions with the feds.
NYSIC documents published by the transparency collectives Distributed Denial of Secrets and Public Intelligence offered insight into the State Police’s gang surveillance practices, while manuals published by various state and local police agencies confirmed the criteria NYSIC uses to add people to the database. And ICE privacy disclosures, detailed in reports from The Intercept and 404 Media, confirmed the most direct path by which ICE can access information from the statewide gang database.
Are you a journalist hoping to duplicate this investigation in your state? We’d love to hear from you: Email chris@nysfocus.com.
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