Earlier this month, a judge’s decision indefinitely barred Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from having an office in the Rikers Island jail complex, citing that it would violate the sanctuary status of New York City. However, ICE may still have access to the jails’ massive audio surveillance database through a Fusion Center — an intelligence-sharing hub conceived and partly funded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — that the city does not acknowledge, according to court filings and official documents. The implications are far reaching, as many warn the access could violate the sanctuary status of the city and provide the Trump administration with data it cannot lawfully obtain.
Operated by Securus Technologies, a prison technologies firm that delivers pay-per-call telephone services to prisons throughout the United States, the audio surveillance platform, NextGen Secure Communications Platform, enables New York City’s Department of Correction (DOC) to monitor inmates’ phone calls. The technology also records and analyzes conversations using automated voice recognition technology and automated content analysis to capture unique patterns in voice and speech, known as voiceprints, that can be used to track and identify both inmates and those whom they communicate with, according to a joint media investigation. And according to the ACLU, the technology can also track the location of people being called from prison, including friends, family and minors.
“This Rikers Fusion Team appears to have direct access to Securus’s NextGen Secure Communications Platform and all its data streams,” stated Elizabeth Daniel Vasquez, the director of the science and surveillance project at Brooklyn Defender Services (BDS), in an affirmation filed in an ongoing class action lawsuit to stop audio surveillance in Rikers Island.
According to Daniel Vasquez, Securus — which has an $11.4 million contract with DOC — is capable of providing federal authorities with a wealth of data. Threads — a massive database of recorded calls, phone records, billing names and addresses, pooled and shared between the thousands of facilities where Securus operates — interacts with NextGen’s platform, and has integration capabilities with Palantir, the surveillance and analytics corporation tapped by the Trump administration to create a “master database” interconnecting data from the federal administration and state and local governments to surveil and track immigrants.
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From Rikers Island, Securus has recorded almost 25,000 phone calls per day, according to data obtained by BDS via a Freedom of Information Act request. Public defenders argue that this violates the DOC’s own rules as well as state and federal law and the constitutional rights of people in and out of the complex. The company has been involved in at least 10 other lawsuits across the country for unlawfully recording and disseminating attorney-client calls, of which at least four resulted in settlements that cost more than $6 million to Securus, and, in two cases, the private prison operator CoreCivic, according to court documents.
The public defenders’ lawsuit is asking the NY State Supreme Court to order DOC to stop all recordings of privileged legal conversations and all telephonic recording activities, and terminate its contract with Securus. In May, the plaintiffs proposed a mediator to find a solution, but DOC refused.
Fusion Centers are at least partly funded by the DHS and are operated by states and localities to collect, analyze, and disseminate intelligence. They “were designed to create formal data sharing structures between the partner agencies, and that means having local police departments collaborating with ICE to deport their neighbors,” Albert Fox, executive director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) said in a Zoom interview with Documented.
Neither DHS nor the city acknowledge having a Fusion Center on Rikers.
The official Fusion Center in New York is the State Intelligence Center near Albany. City officials, however, have made multiple references to the Fusion Center on Rikers Island, a complex that comprises 10 jails holding over 7,000 inmates, the vast majority of whom (87%) are legally innocent since they are in pretrial detention.
The “Official Newsletter” of the DOC stated in 2019 that the Fusion Center on Rikers Island “is expected to double in size.” Cynthia Brann, commissioner of the DOC at the time, also mentioned a Fusion Center on Rikers in testimony to the City Council in March 2019.
Cognizant of the two pieces of evidence, Patrick Rocchio, spokesperson for DOC, did not dispute the existence of a Fusion Center, but stressed in an email to Documented that, “ICE does not currently maintain any presence on Rikers Island.” He added that “only very limited DOC personnel have access to Securus data.” The data, however, has been shared with law enforcement agents, according to DOC’s own audits. Shown to public defender services, the audits revealed that the agency “improperly recorded thousands of privileged legal calls and disseminated them to prosecutors and law enforcement.” The sharing of information “was clearly systemic” and it went on for years, they claim.
As early as 2018, four of the city’s public defenders services began receiving recordings of their privileged calls with clients from district attorneys’ offices demonstrating, according to the lawsuit, “that DOC is not only recording privileged phone calls, but also sharing that data with law enforcement.” Given the widespread sharing of privileged calls and the public mentions of DOC of a Fusion Center at Rikers, Alyssa Briody, senior staff attorney at BDS, concluded that: “We do know there is a Fusion Center at Rikers,” and that data that DOC puts into the Fusion Center can be accessed directly by law enforcement agencies. “There wouldn’t be as much of a trail in terms of who is accessing recordings,” she said to Documented.
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ICE could also directly access the recordings at Rikers through Threads, as Securus serves “more than 3,400 public safety, law enforcement and corrections agencies and over 1.2 million incarcerated individuals across North America.” Through Threads, employed by more than 2,200 law enforcement agencies across the United States, according to court documents, Securus allows its users to “share data” with other jails and law enforcement agencies through “a centralized database.”
One of the Threads users is the NY Police Department, court documents show, as well as county jails that have contracts with ICE to hold immigrants. As of June 2025, ICE lists Securus as a phone and video service provider in seven county jails it uses as detention centers for immigrants.
“All the information that’s harvested from the DOC surveillance system is fed into the Threads system,” said Briody, “which is available to Securus customers nationwide, and that includes law enforcement agencies and other correctional agencies.”
Violating sanctuary
On June 13, state Judge Mary Rosado issued a decision that indefinitely blocked Mayor Eric Adams’ order allowing ICE to have an office on Rikers Island. Adams — indicted by federal prosecutors in 2024 for conspiracy to defraud the United States, wire fraud, soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals, and bribery — had “negotiated away sanctuary city protections for a dismissal of his ongoing criminal prosecution,” opined Rosado.
Sanctuary laws in NYC mandate that local authorities cooperate with ICE only if immigration agents show a judicial warrant in a criminal investigation, not in immigration civil cases.To uphold sanctuary ordinances, ICE was banned from Rikers in 2014. However, in an amici letter filed on the case against Adam’s plan, 16 civil rights organizations and public defender services claimed that “the culture of collusion that already exists between local agencies and federal authorities will grow exponentially,” if ICE were allowed back in Rikers.
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DOC cooperation with ICE has been well documented. “DOC regularly illegally communicates with ICE about people who do not have a conviction for a qualifying offense,” IDP said in a 2023 statement after obtaining official emails exchanged from 2015 to 2019. As recently as 2023, DOC claimed that ICE has never produced a signed judicial warrant since 2014, according to testimony of Bronx Defenders in court filings about barring ICE from Rikers. Still, DOC has repeatedly facilitated transfers of people to ICE upon their release from Rikers.
On March 13, 2025, an incarcerated New Yorker, R.B., who was scheduled to be released from Rikers, was instead handed over by DOC to ICE agents, without a judicial warrant, Bronx Defenders testified. Sent to immigration detention, R.B. was dreading being sent to El Salvador or Venezuela, where he had fled persecution by both the Tren de Aragua gang and the Venezuelan government.
For Leqaa Kordia, a New Jersey resident of Palestinian origin, the NYPD provided ICE with sealed arrest record information in March from an alleged violation related to her participation in a protest in support of Palestinian lives at Columbia University. Her case was quickly dismissed, but it reflected “a broader culture of collusion between ICE and city agencies,” according to the Bronx Defenders testimony.
City officials claim they cooperate only with the branch of ICE responsible for criminal cases, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). Nonetheless, the Trump administration has systematically shattered the distinction between criminal and non-criminal immigration cases — the latter a responsibility of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) — as HSI has carried out workplace raids since Trump’s first term.
In recent months, immigrants across the country have been accused of having a criminal record without any evidence, and as a result were detained and deported without due process, such was the case for more than 200 Venezuelans who were expelled to CECOT prison in El Salvador, many of whom were lawfully in the United States.
“Homeland Security Investigations often is a direct partner to the Fusion Centers,” said Fox. “And while historically we’ve seen a lot of elected officials trying to distinguish ERO from HSI, that incredibly blurry line has been completely erased from the drawing board under the Trump administration.”
For the public defenders suing the DOC, the only solution to avoid Rikers Island from sharing recordings with law enforcement agencies is to ban Securus altogether. “Securus has engaged in a longstanding, nationwide practice of illegal recordings,” claims the lawsuit. It’s clear “DOC will not fix the problems in its unlawful surveillance system without judicial intervention.”
