Court Hears Arguments on Releasing Trump Administration Memo Claiming to Justify Caribbean Boat Strikes

WASHINGTON – The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a new report today about the increasingly central role that surveillance and tech companies are playing in US police departments and how that threatens to give private companies unfettered access to Americans’ sensitive data. The report examines the major companies involved, the potential ways this information could be abused or exploited, and the history of close ties between corporations and police. Every day, police across the country use body cameras, drones, dash cams, and fixed surveillance cameras gathering hours upon hours of footage of people going about their daily lives. And now, some of the biggest surveillance tech companies, including Axon, Flock, and Motorola, want to gather, analyze, and control this data by providing “operating systems” for police departments that, like operating systems on computers and phones, can see and control all the data in the system. This will threaten the civil rights and civil liberties of everyone who interacts with one of these cameras — knowingly or not. Part of this trend is the movement towards police cloud services, which facilitates the consolidation of data from thousands of U.S. police departments within corporate servers and gives these private actors live remote control over the surveillance tech even after it’s deployed in communities. Or as Axon puts it on their website, “integrating hardware devices and cloud software solutions” in “the Axon ecosystem” and connecting “every officer, responder and agency.” “Putting private, for-profit companies at the heart of modern police departments — what could go wrong? The answer is: plenty, and that’s what this paper outlines” said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.“Policymakers, the public, and the policing profession need to grapple with the implications of this corporatization of police departments — especially for people’s civil rights and liberties — and address it before this becomes normalized and leads to new forms of abuse we’ve never seen before.” These new corporate efforts to expand their work with police are especially worrying given how quickly surveillance technology is proliferating across the country — and how few places have strong guardrails or oversight in place. As the report details, there are many ways providers could exploit their insider access to this data, including using it to go after critics, journalists, labor unions, regulators, and competitors, or to try and fend off investigations into their products. The lack of safeguards also means that company employees could use this data to target exes, manipulate prediction markets, or even alter evidence. Unfortunately, it’s not just the companies selling these products that the public needs to be worried about. According to the report, there is another set of players that raise many of the same concerns about private companies’ access to police data and the corporate role in policing: cloud computing platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, which currently also have access to the growing mountain of data generated by surveillance-based policing. The report lays out six recommendations that policymakers could implement to protect their constituents. Recommendations include contract requirements restricting private vendors’ access to law enforcement data, mandating the use of local rather than cloud services, and passing both the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act and Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) laws.

WHAT: On June 24, 2026, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights will argue before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in a Freedom of Information Act case related to the Trump administration’s ongoing illegal boat strikes in the Eastern Caribbean and Pacific Ocean. The groups are asking the court to order the Trump administration to immediately release a still-secret legal opinion authored by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that administration officials have repeatedly invoked as the purported legal basis for its ongoing lethal strikes campaign, which has killed over 200 civilians. Judge Paul A. Engelmayer has ordered the parties to discuss at the hearing whether he should personally review the OLC legal opinion in his chambers to inform his decision. WHO: Jeffrey Stein, staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project WHEN: June 24, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. WHERE: Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse, Courtroom 1305 (40 Foley Square, New York, NY 10007) Press are welcome to attend in person. ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights spokespeople will be available for interviews after the argument. If you have questions, please reach out to Allegra Harpootlian (aharpootlian@aclu.org) and Jen Nessel (press@ccrjustice.org) BACKGROUND: Since Sept. 2, 2025, the Trump administration has conducted at least 64 strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean, murdering at least 210 civilians, in clear violation of domestic and international law. In October 2025, ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit to enforce their Freedom of Information Act request seeking immediate disclosure of the OLC opinion that not only provides the legal reasoning and governing parameters for the strikes but reportedly purports to immunize personnel who authorized or took part in these unlawful strikes from future criminal prosecution. The Trump administration has repeatedly acknowledged the existence of this memo but has refused to subject it to public scrutiny. The ACLU, ACLU of Massachusetts, and the Center for Constitutional Rights are also representing two Trinidadian families, who are suing after the Trump administration killed their loved ones in October of last year. The men — Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo — were headed home after working as farm hands in Venezuela when the U.S. bombed their boat, killing them and four other people.

Surveillance Boosters Tout the Benefits of Deterrence, But There’s a Big Problem With That

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Robert Dillon is suing the Jacksonville Beach Police Department, as well as the Jacksonville and Pinellas County Sheriff’s Offices, after he was wrongfully arrested due to a faulty facial recognition match. The police relied on an incorrect result from facial recognition technology to get an arrest warrant, while concealing evidence that showed he could not have committed the crime he was being accused of. He is one of 15 known people to have this happen to them in the United States. “The night I spent in jail after they arrested me for a crime I did not commit still haunts me to this day. I will never get over how terrified and worried I was, wondering if I’d ever go home to my wife and daughter again,” said Robert Dillon. “Over a year later, I’m still picking up the pieces of my life, all because the police relied on this dangerous technology instead of doing their jobs and actually investigating. Florida police must implement safeguards and ensure this never happens to anyone else, because until they do, nobody is safe.” Fifty-two-year-old Robert Dillon lives in Fort Myers, Florida with his wife and daughter. His life was irreparably changed in August 2024, when police arrested him for a crime he never committed. Mr. Dillon was accused of trying to lure a child at a fast-food restaurant in Jacksonville Beach, more than 300 miles away from his home, after a Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office employee ran grainy surveillance photos of the suspect through an AI-assisted facial recognition program, which identified Dillon as a possible match. Using only that, and the statement of a restaurant employee who picked his photo out of a lineup, Jacksonville Beach police got an arrest warrant. As the lawsuit explains, the photo lineup was unreliable because when facial recognition technology generates a false match, it will often be to someone who looks similar to the suspect, thus misleading witnesses who are asked to choose between that innocent lookalike and a set of random filler photos. What police didn’t tell the court is that a McDonald’s employee said the suspect was a “regular” at the Jacksonville Beach restaurant, but that Mr. Dillon lived five hours away and had told police he had never even been to Jacksonville Beach in his life, and that an automatic license plate reader search showed no hits on his car anywhere near the Jacksonville Beach McDonald’s in the days surrounding the crime. The prosecutor has since dropped the charges against Mr. Dillon, and the record of his arrest has been wiped; however, the trauma remains. He was forced to borrow money and pledge the title to his truck to post bond, he lost income while he was subjected to months of criminal prosecution, he was publicly branded with a mugshot that remains accessible online, long after the charges were dropped, and community members still approach him in public to ask about the case. No law enforcement agency has ever apologized. “No one should lose their freedom or be scared to leave their house because an algorithm got it wrong,” said Nate Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “These Florida police departments owe it to Mr. Dillon to make amends and to take serious steps to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else. Police across the country are on notice: Unreliable face recognition technology is hurting people, and we will keep fighting to hold them accountable for these abuses.” Mr. Dillon is suing the Jacksonville Beach Police Department, Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, and responsible police officers for damages. He is also demanding serious policy changes be instituted immediately. The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office operates the statewide facial recognition technology system that was used to misidentify Mr. Dillon. A second wrongful arrest by Florida police due to reliance on the Pinellas County system was reported earlier this year. And just last week, reporting revealed that the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office wrongfully arrested a North Carolina resident after relying on an incorrect result from facial recognition technology. That man spent three months in jail, losing his job, his home, and custody of his children, before charges were dropped. “One wrongful arrest is one too many — this should have never happened to Mr. Dillon,” said Nicholas Warren, staff attorney at the ACLU of Florida. “Florida’s growing reliance on facial recognition technology threatens us all. We must stop this dangerous pattern before it traps more innocent people. No one should have their freedom taken away because the police rely on faulty technology." The technology frequently gets it wrong, and testing has repeatedly shown that facial recognition systems exhibit higher rates of false matches when used on people of color, women, older people, and young people. To date, police in Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Louisiana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Florida, and Arizona are publicly known to have wrongfully arrested people due to reliance on this technology. “Robert’s case illustrates the stakes when police deploy AI-assisted identification tools without adequate safeguards. Digital information can be a powerful tool for law enforcement, but its proliferation, supercharged by the AI boom, carries profound Fourth Amendment implications,” said Steve Silverberg, counsel at Hoguet Newman Regal & Kenney, LLP. “We are proud to stand with Robert and the ACLU in holding these agencies accountable, and in making clear that technological advancements, however enticing, do not suspend constitutional obligations.” Mr. Dillon is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Florida, and Hoguet Newman Regal & Kenney, LLP.