Cleveland has long championed immigrants as vital to its population growth and economic revival. However, a closer examination reveals a stark contrast between the city’s infrastructure for tracking immigrants and its efforts to attract them.
A Flock Safety license plate reader is seen along a public road. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)
Surveillance Infrastructure: The Unseen Network
In 2026, Cleveland’s Flock license-plate-reader network was searched nearly 2,000 times using terms associated with immigration or ICE. Cleveland Heights recorded another 1,783 immigration-related searches through data collected by only 20 cameras. Most of these searches originated from agencies outside Ohio, with stated reasons including “immigration enforcement” and “immigration overstay.”
The city’s police department asserts that these automated license-plate readers are primarily used to investigate serious crimes such as homicides, shootings, and stolen vehicles. While these public-safety uses are undeniably important, the potential for misuse in civil immigration enforcement raises significant concerns.
Civil immigration enforcement differs markedly from ordinary crime fighting. Individuals may face deportation for overstaying a visa or violating immigration status without ever having been convicted of a crime or posing a danger to anyone. Flock’s technology cannot distinguish between a vehicle connected to a serious crime and one driven by an individual accused only of an immigration violation. This indiscriminate surveillance can expose sensitive information about where families live, work, worship, receive medical care, or pick up children.
The Peralta Case: A Cautionary Tale
The dangers of such surveillance are not theoretical. In Peralta v. Department of Homeland Security a federal judge recently found that immigration agencies had authorized a “widespread and persistent pattern of illegal warrantless arrests in Ohio.” Although the court dismissed the proposed class action on standing grounds, its factual finding underscores the need for caution in allowing locally collected location data to support civil immigration enforcement.
Attraction Efforts: A History of Underachievement
Cleveland’s efforts to attract immigrants have been far less robust than its surveillance infrastructure. The city has spent nearly two decades promoting immigrants as essential to its revival, yet it has failed to build an immigrant-attraction strategy commensurate with its demographic and economic needs.
Global Cleveland, a nonprofit organization launched in 2011, aimed to promote population and economic growth by attracting people from around the world. However, business support developed slowly, political backing was weak, and the organization ultimately operated with more modest ambitions. Without the resources or political mandate required for a true recruitment campaign, Global Cleveland concentrated much of its work on welcoming, connecting, and educating newcomers.
These functions are undoubtedly valuable, but they are not a substitute for a comprehensive recruitment strategy. Cleveland’s population peaked at 914,808 in 1950 and has since declined. In 2005, Mayor Jane Campbell set a goal of restoring the city’s population to above 500,000 by 2010, identifying immigrant entrepreneurs as part of the solution. Today, Cleveland has roughly 364,000 residents, and the broader region still depends on international migration merely to keep from shrinking.
The Missing Coalition
The region’s failure to create a shared-growth strategy has left legitimate concerns in Black Cleveland unaddressed. Residents who endured industrial job loss, redlining, neighborhood disinvestment, and broken development promises had every reason to question why civic leaders showed urgency about recruiting international talent without demonstrating equal urgency about developing people already here.
The answer should never have been to choose between immigrants and longtime Cleveland residents. Instead, Cleveland could have connected immigrant attraction with Black workforce development, business ownership, vacant-housing rehabilitation, and neighborhood investment. A larger workforce and tax base could have supported stronger public services and broader opportunity. Black and immigrant entrepreneurs could have acquired viable companies from retiring owners, preserved local jobs, and prevented another wave of empty storefronts.
The Path Forward
Cleveland’s regional leadership must finally build the immigrant-growth strategy they have discussed for years. This strategy should include a funded coalition, measurable recruitment and retention goals, support for Black and immigrant business succession, and serious federal advocacy for place-based immigration options serving regions confronting population loss.
Cleveland cannot control Washington’s deportation agenda, but it can control what happens to data collected on Cleveland streets. The city should prohibit the use or disclosure of automated license-plate-reader data for civil immigration enforcement. Any immigration-related request should require a judicial warrant tied to a genuine criminal investigation—not an administrative immigration warrant signed by an immigration officer. Search logs should be independently audited and published, and agencies that misrepresent their purposes should permanently lose access.
Greater Cleveland added only 2,539 residents between July 2026 and July 2026. International migration contributed 5,082 people, while deaths exceeded births and domestic migration remained negative. Without newcomers from abroad, the region would still be shrinking. These residents staff hospitals, restaurants, factories, and construction companies. They buy homes, support neighborhood businesses, start companies, and pay the taxes that finance local services.
Cleveland cannot credibly ask immigrants to stabilize its population, sustain its workforce, and rebuild its neighborhoods while leaving open routes through which their movements may be searched for civil deportation purposes. The city must decide whether immigrant attraction will remain civic rhetoric or become actual economic-development policy.
