ICE Is Spending $31 Million on Body Cameras You’ll Never Be Allowed to See

Funny how the government always finds money for cameras, but never finds a rule that says you get to watch the footage.

ICE announced over the weekend that every field officer will be wearing a body camera by the end of August. Maybe September, depending on which outlet you trust. Thirty-one million dollars of your money, cut to Axon or whoever got the contract, and the rollout is being pitched as a transparency milestone. Acting Director David J. Venturella put out a statement about protecting investigations and privacy, said it’s all consistent with federal law. Real reassuring stuff from a man whose agency runs black-site detention centers.

Here’s the part they buried. The policy says ICE will release footage of shootings and other encounters where agents cause death or serious injury only after determining it is “in the best interests of the agency” to do so. Read that again. Not the public’s interest. Not the interest of whoever got shot. The agency’s interest. The same agency that shot the person gets to decide whether you see the video of them shooting the person.

Ask yourself who benefits from that arrangement.

Kindel Media / Pexels

Professor Christopher Schneider, who has studied body cameras for a decade up at Brandon University in Canada, said he doesn’t expect ICE to release footage of the fatal shootings last month in Houston and Maine. He pointed out that ICE’s sister agency, Customs and Border Protection, still hasn’t released camera footage of the January shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott told lawmakers in February that the video was “under investigation” and would be made public “when it’s appropriate.” That was six months ago. Still waiting.

So the track record is zero. The policy is written to keep it at zero. And they’re calling it accountability.

Even when ICE does throw you a bone, the footage will arrive scrubbed. Every officer’s face, name, and badge number redacted. You’ll see a uniform doing something, but you won’t know who. Privacy, they say. The same privacy they don’t extend to the people they pull out of their cars at checkpoints, or the families they separate at detention centers. Privacy is a one-way street in this country. It runs toward the badge and away from you.

The cameras are real. The $30.9 million is real. The accountability is a ghost.

Chad Davis from Minneapolis, United States (CC BY 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Local police departments across the country have spent years fighting disclosure rules on body camera footage, and the pattern is always the same. The camera is sold to the public as a watchdog. Then the department writes the policy. Then the policy says the department controls the footage. Then the department decides what you see. Then you see almost nothing. ICE just skipped the middle steps and wrote the ending first.

This isn’t a left-right thing, or at least it shouldn’t be. You either believe the government should show you what its agents do with the power you gave them, or you don’t. ICE has made its position clear. The cameras are for them. The footage is for them. The $31 million came from you.

Venturella says the restrictions protect investigations. Every agency that ever buried a video said the same thing. The investigation is always ongoing. The timing is never appropriate. The interests of the agency are never served by showing you the worst thing the agency did.

The little guy pays for the camera, wears the cost, and gets the closed door. That’s not a glitch in the system. That is the system.