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Imagine you’re visiting a retail shop, stocking groceries for the week, or moving through a mall on a shopping spree, and a week later, ICE knocks on your door, asking questions about an investigation you have no relation to.
This scary scenario could soon become a reality with the new Combating Organized Retail Crime Act (CORCA), introduced allegedly to curb organized retail crime across thousands of retailers in the U.S.[1]
However, privacy advocates warn that the bill could create a broad new channel for retailers to share investigative information, potentially including camera footage and license plate data, with a center housed inside ICE.
Here’s what the bill entails and why you should be worried about growing government surveillance.
CORCA, which would establish a new Organized Retail and Supply Chain Crime Coordination Center inside ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), passed the House of Representatives with an overwhelming 348-60 vote in May 2026.
The bill states that more than 84% of retailers have reported violence and aggression from such organized theft since 2022. Separately, CargoNet reports the average value of the theft has risen to $202,000.
Section 3 would allow certain stolen-property values to be aggregated over 12 months to meet a $5,000 federal threshold. It would also add gift cards, gift certificates, and general-use prepaid cards to the monetary instruments covered by federal money-laundering law.
But does creating a loosely defined information-sharing channel inside ICE really seem like the right solution?
Proposed Section 305A(b)(2)(D) and (E) state that the center would establish relationships with retail, transportation, and other companies, share threat information with them, collaborate on investigations, and create a mechanism for receiving investigative information from them.
The bill would create a new center and information-sharing system while relying partly on existing DHS and DOJ systems. It does not explain precisely where privately supplied information would be stored or which DHS components could access it.
ACLU counsels Nina Patel and Jina John have argued that the bill does not adequately define important terms, including what information companies could provide regarding organized retail and supply-chain crime “threats.”
John and Patel also point out that retailers, which remain undefined in the act, commonly possess a lot of surveillance data through in-store cameras and parking-lot ALPRs, which could be shared with the ICE-based center through the proposed information-sharing mechanism.
John said that instead of the federal government having to pay data brokers for surveillance information, CORCA gives it direct access to retailer-controlled camera data.
Spencer Reynolds, a senior counsel at the Justice in Public Safety Project at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said, “The entire model that CORCA is going to impose allows government and industry participants to overcome protections, safeguards, guardrails, and use government to target their opposition.”
ICE has been at the center of several controversies over the past two years.
As per reports from 404 Media, several police authorities were found running unofficial searches on Flock’s camera data on behalf of ICE, facilitating its Enforcement and Removal Operations division.
Furthermore, several city workers in Dayton, Ohio, started covering Flock cameras with trash bags after an investigation found that Dayton’s Flock camera data had been available for thousands of immigration-related searches, apparently because of an incorrectly configured sharing setting.
These incidents have intensified concerns about giving another information-sharing role to an agency already facing scrutiny over its immigration-enforcement tactics. An NBC News Decision Desk poll found that 67% of Americans said that ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) tactics had gone too far.
And with the new CORCA bill, collected information could eventually be repurposed for immigration enforcement, although the bill does not expressly authorize that use.
Following this series of events, Senator Schumer urged Americans to “keep showing up—lawfully—and documenting abuses by ICE.”
Additionally, Senator Ron Wyden said that the country doesn’t need “an American Gestapo rousting tourists, immigrants, and naturalized and native-born Americans alike with guns to their heads.”
A Reuters report from July found that the Trump administration charged at least 851 people between January 2025 and March 2026 for attacking or impeding federal officers.
However, 31% of completed cases ended in dismissal, nearly four times the average 8% dismissal rate for federal criminal cases.
Flock is testing a new AI system that allows law enforcement authorities to query thousands of its cameras across 6,000 communities to find vehicles and owners using behavioral patterns.
Reportedly, police officers would no longer need a specific crime or suspicion to initiate such searches and could do so freely with the help of 45 tools and 69 pre-built prompts.
On top of this, Leonardo, a multinational security company, has built a new sensor tool called SignalTrace. It collects wireless signals and identifiers emitted by devices such as phones, smartwatches, fitness trackers, and RFID tags. Where license plate readers are present, the system can correlate those signals with vehicle records and store the resulting electronic signatures for later searches.
Leonardo says SignalTrace does not decrypt or read the contents of device communications.
But this whole mass surveillance system essentially means that law enforcement agencies have several tools at their disposal that could disclose your identity and personal information.
Worse still, if this information falls into the wrong hands or is leaked during a data breach, it could be highly valuable to malicious actors.
As such, it’s advisable to get a reliable identity theft protection service. These tools regularly scan the dark web and leaked databases for your personally identifiable information and offer professional identity restoration services.
CORCA is intended to combat organized retail and supply-chain crime, but its vaguely defined information-sharing provisions leave important privacy questions unanswered.
The bill does not explicitly give ICE live access to retailer cameras or require companies to provide surveillance footage. However, its open-ended language could allow camera footage, license plate records, and other consumer information to flow into a new center housed inside ICE.
Consumers have little control over surveillance information retailers collect. Identity theft protection cannot tell you whether the government obtained your image or license plate data, but some services can monitor credit files, dark-web sources, and known data leaks for certain personal and financial information.
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