The surveillance state is here. Across the country, local police departments have been tapping into school security cameras to help ICE. Your kid’s schools are now nodes in Trump’s immigration dragnet — and most parents have no idea.

Investigative reporting revealed that officers conducted hundreds of thousands of searches in a national license plate reader database that includes feeds from public school districts.

These cameras — often installed in parking lots and near school entrances — automatically capture plate numbers, timestamps, and vehicle details, uploading them into a cloud system accessible to law enforcement nationwide.

The company at the center of this network, Flock Safety, markets the technology as a crime-fighting tool. Schools buy in under the banner of “student safety.”

But once a district opts into nationwide sharing, those school cameras become searchable by police agencies across the country. Immigration-related queries were logged hundreds of times in a single district over just one month.

Parents dropping off a five-year-old. Teenagers arriving for first period. Families attending a football game. All swept into a searchable surveillance system that can assist federal deportation efforts.

And this isn’t a small pilot program. Flock operates tens of thousands of cameras nationwide across thousands of networks. When an agency runs a nationwide search, it can automatically scan every participating camera — including those owned by school districts.

What was sold as “protecting kids” is quietly being repurposed into infrastructure for a broader crackdown.

Civil immigration searches — not violent crime investigations — appear frequently in audit logs. Meanwhile, ICE arrests of people without criminal records have surged in recent years, raising serious questions about who is actually being targeted.

Some states are starting to push back, proposing limits on how long data can be stored and who can access it. A few police departments have paused their programs under public pressure.

But in most communities, parents were never told this was happening.

School districts occupy a unique moral position. They are entrusted with children’s safety and privacy. When campus technology is folded into national law enforcement networks without meaningful public debate, that trust erodes.

Schools should not function as passive intelligence hubs in a mass surveillance web.

If protecting students is the goal, then transparency, strict limits, and community consent should be non-negotiable.

Because a school parking lot should be exactly what it sounds like — not a backdoor into a federal immigration database.