Josh Epstein, Director of the Immigration Practice at Brooklyn Defender Services’ Queens Office, testified before the New York City Council Committee on Immigration at an oversight hearing on the Executive Order 13 audit of city agencies’ compliance with New York City’s sanctuary laws. Citing the audit’s finding that only 24 of 3,672 civil immigration detainer requests were authorized under city law, Epstein urged the Mayor’s Office to review how the NYPD audits access to its surveillance systems and voiced BDS’s support for the NYC Trust Act (Int. 209-2026), which would let people seek judicial review when city agencies cooperate with ICE in violation of municipal law. “We cannot claim to have identified or stopped every leak of New Yorkers’ information to immigration authorities when we have no reliable way of knowing who is accessing these databases, for what purposes, or whether that information is being shared outside authorized channels,” Epstein said.

Talia Kamran, Staff Attorney in the Seizure and Surveillance Defense Project appeared on KPFA's Law and Disorder radio program on September 3 to unpack Big Apple Connect, the New York City program that promised free internet to public housing residents and instead helped open the door to mass police surveillance. Kamran explained how the city wired NYCHA buildings with free Wi-Fi and then linked roughly 20,000 hallway, lobby, and elevator cameras into the NYPD's centralized Domain Awareness System, concentrating surveillance on residents who already bear far more of it than other New Yorkers.