tags: surveillance, ice, retail, civil liberties

A bill aimed at stopping thieves at Walmart would turn immigration agents into a domestic surveillance force.

"ICE cannot be trusted."

— Nina Patel, senior counsel, ACLU

The House of Representatives passed legislation in May that would grant Immigration and Customs Enforcement authority over what the bill calls "organized retail crime." In plain English, that means shoplifting. The bill, H.R. 2853, known as the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act (CORCA), is now headed to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Senators Chuck Grassley and Dick Durbin are working to attach it to the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act. The NDAA is one of the few bills that reliably passes with bipartisan majorities.

On its face, CORCA sounds like common sense: stop the theft that retailers say is devastating their bottom lines. But the mechanism the bill creates would be something entirely different. It would establish an "Organized Retail and Supply Chain Crime Coordination Center" inside DHS, staffed by ICE agents and helmed by a director appointed by the head of ICE. This center would bring together analysts from the FBI, DEA, Customs and Border Protection, and the Secret Service under a single roof dedicated to tracking down people who steal merchandise from stores.

The ACLU warned in a July letter that the bill would formalize a mechanism for retailers to share continuous surveillance footage with DHS. In practice, this means license plate readers in parking lots and camera feeds from inside malls would flow directly to an immigration enforcement agency.

Translation: the bill uses shoplifting as the Trojan horse for a massive expansion of domestic surveillance.

CORCA was introduced by Grassley in 2025 with wide bipartisan support, and thirteen Democratic senators co-sponsored it, including Amy Klobuchar, Mark Warner, and Democratic Whip Durbin. The text claims that organized retail theft is happening at "unprecedented levels" and that perpetrators are "often polycriminal organizations" involved in drug trafficking, weapons smuggling, and human smuggling.

The premise is disputed. The National Retail Federation, a trade group that supports the bill, previously claimed that organized retail crime was responsible for 50 percent of the nearly $100 billion in missing merchandise in 2021. In December 2023, the NRF quietly retracted that figure. The actual number was closer to 5 percent.

The companies lobbying for this legislation stand to benefit from deeper ties between corporate America and federal law enforcement. CORCA would allow companies deemed to have "significant interests" in retail theft to enter information-sharing agreements with the government about threats, investigations, and loss prevention. Amazon, Home Depot, and the International Council of Shopping Centers have all publicly urged Congress to pass the bill.

Jina John, a senior policy counsel at the ACLU, told The Intercept that the risk goes far beyond clips of people lifting candy bars. "When retailers share information, it's not a specific clip of footage related to a specific theft," she said. "In practice, they are sharing continuous footage."

The agency tasked with running this center is the same ICE that has repeatedly operated without regard for the law. Under Trump's second term, the agency has been documented targeting legal observers, recruiting with racist imagery on social media, and using chemical irritants against protesters outside detention facilities. A judge ruled earlier this year that Rubio and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem intentionally targeted pro-Palestine activists to chill protected speech.

Despite this record, CORCA would give ICE more access to personal data and more influence over local law enforcement than it currently has. The center's director would have authority to release information deemed confidential under federal law, including the identity, financial data, and business records of individuals and corporations.

Patel put it bluntly: "Given that this director will be named by ICE, an agency that has acted without any regard for the law, this is probably not the best person to make such important judgments."

Fusion centers are nothing new. They were created after September 11, 2001, to coordinate intelligence on international terrorism. Over the past two decades, their mandate has broadened to encompass everything from tracking anti-fracking protesters to surveilling Black Lives Matter demonstrations. The CORCA center would function as essentially a new fusion center, nominally focused on retail theft but built on the same architecture.

Durbin and Grassley are now pushing to add CORCA as an amendment to the NDAA, a bill about funding the Pentagon. Their justification is that it will "reduce violent crime." A press release from Grassley's office in July included endorsements from executives at Amazon and Home Depot.

The NAACP and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law joined the ACLU in opposing the bill. All three organizations warned that CORCA would expand the country's public-private surveillance apparatus under the guise of protecting store shelves.

The House passed CORCA in May. Now it waits in the Senate Judiciary Committee for its moment on the NDAA floor. When that comes, Democrats who co-sponsored the bill will need to defend why an immigration enforcement agency should serve as the federal government's chief shoplifting tracker.

The people who stand to lose the most are the same ones ICE has already targeted: poor people, people of color, undocumented immigrants, and anyone who happens to walk past a camera when the wrong thing is happening nearby. The bill's sponsors say it fights crime. The civil liberties groups say it creates crime out of existing retail losses and uses that fiction to justify a new surveillance state.

The question isn't whether shoplifting is a problem. The question is whether solving it requires turning ICE into America's premier retail watchman.