In a letter to Pennsylvania Governor Josh ShapiroDemocratic lawmakers are letting the Commonwealth and other states know that a poorly understood digital loophole could result in driver data being shared with U.S. immigration authorities.
Correspondence with the USA Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and 39 other members of Congress, including Pennsylvania Representatives of Madeleine Dean (D-04) i Summer Lee (D-12) Urges Shapiro to block ICE access, as Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Washington have already done and Oregon is in the process of doing, and to consider further action by blocking access to other federal agencies that are currently serving as Trump hit squads.”
ICE is able to recover this information because the Pennsylvania State Police provides outside law enforcement agencies with real-time access to PennDOT’s database, which contains driver’s licenses and other state ID cards. Data sharing is done through a non-profit organization managed by state police agencies known as “Nlets” – the International Network for Justice and Public Safety.
The Nlets website states: “We are the information superhighway for the law enforcement community. Just like a highway exists for the transportation of vehicles, we exist to get criminal justice information where it needs to be. Please note, however, that we do not own any data used in the criminal justice or public safety spheres – we exist solely to securely access and communicate this information to the criminal justice community.”
ICE and Homeland Security Investigation also have access to the system, and together they made approximately 900,000 queries to the database between October 1, 2024 and September 30, 2025.
The letter states that each state can determine what data it wants to share through Nlets, as well as specify the agencies that can or cannot access its data.
“According to public data released by Nlets, 20 states and the District of Columbia allow law enforcement agencies to search driver’s license records based on any person’s name and date of birth. In turn, all 50 states and the District allow agencies to search driver records based on driver’s license number. Theoretically, driver’s license number lookups are less likely to be used for network surveillance; however, driver’s license numbers can be easily purchased from commercial data brokers.”
The authors say the reason only four states – Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota and New York – blocked the data is because of an information gap. Few state government officials understand how their state’s residents’ data is shared, and they have not been adequately informed about the current scale of information shared with ICE and other federal agencies.
After partnering with congressional Democrats, Washington state plans to block ICE access to DMV data, and Oregon is also moving in this direction.
“To be clear, blocking an agency’s unrestricted access to state data through Nlets will not prevent federal law enforcement agencies from obtaining the information they need to investigate serious crimes, but taking these measures will significantly increase accountability and reduce abuses by allowing state employees to review data requests from blocked agencies first.”
