Maplewood police forwarded a records request about ICE data sharing to the company that holds their data

On May 11, 2026, a public records request landed in the inbox of the Maplewood Police Department, a St. Paul suburb of about 42,000 people. The requester, researching on behalf of FinePrint, wanted to know how the department's police records might be reaching ICE.

The question was not abstract. Federal agents had spent the winter in the Twin Cities under Operation Metro Surge, which ran from December 4, 2025 to February 12, 2026 and produced roughly 4,000 arrests. Agents shot three people and killed two, both U.S. citizens: Renee Nicole Macklin Good on January 7 and Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, on January 24. The third, Julio Sosa-Celis, was shot in the leg on January 14 when an ICE agent fired through the front door of a Minneapolis home. That agent, Christian Castro, was charged in May with four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime. He was arrested in Texas three days after LexisNexis advised Maplewood to withhold technical documents describing how the department's data is copied out of its records system.

Maplewood sent the request to LexisNexis.

The department has paid the company for the Accurint Virtual Crime Center since January 2025. The contract includes what LexisNexis calls a Database Interface. Once an hour, around the clock, it copies Maplewood's police reports into a national database the company owns and sells access to. ICE is one of the buyers. ICE has held a contract for LexisNexis law enforcement products since February 2021, worth up to $22.1 million over five years once the company added real-time jail booking data that June. In one seven-month stretch in 2021, ICE searched the database more than 1.2 million times.

On May 19 a department lieutenant forwarded the request to LexisNexis. "We are not sure how to respond or what they are looking for, but I was hoping someone on your team could help us out." The company replied within the hour that its lawyers were looking at it. The answer came a week later.

They said that if the requested documents were "not in the customers possession but in LexisNexis's possession," then the company's view is "that they are not producible by LexisNexis since LexisNexis would not be covered under the standard public records request."

In reality, Minnesota is unusual. The state's public records law reaches documents in private hands when a company is doing a government's work. Section 13.05 of the Data Practices Act says that when a government entity hires a private company to perform any of its functions, everything that company creates, receives, stores or hands out while performing them is covered, and the company has to follow the law "as if it were a government entity." The law then lets the public go directly to the company when the records are not available from the agency. That is the situation LexisNexis described as a dead end. Whether it applies here turns on whether copying and reselling a department's police reports counts as doing the department's work.

They also said that where Maplewood holds documents LexisNexis wrote, or documents containing the company's intellectual property, LexisNexis "would want to then make certain any confidential LexisNexis intellectual property is redacted," and that the call "would need to be determined by LexisNexis technical."

In reality, Minnesota has no exemption for a vendor's intellectual property. It has one for trade secrets, and it takes three things: the company supplied the information, the company took reasonable steps to keep it secret, and that secrecy gives it real economic value. The state's Data Practices Office says a document stamped proprietary does not become a trade secret because a company says so, and that the government agency, not the vendor, makes the final call.

Maplewood's own contract concedes the point. It asks the department to keep the pricing confidential "to the extent permitted by local and state law."

Six days after LexisNexis wrote back, Maplewood answered the request. It had nothing. The department does not possess an interface control document or technical implementation guide covering the export of its records or dispatch data to LexisNexis. It does not possess data translation guides, field-mapping tables or schemas. It does not possess, in its own words, "any records, schedules, line-item documents, database interface specifications, or similar records identifying categories of information included in any automated transfer of data to LexisNexis platforms." Anything responsive, the department wrote, "may be in the possession of the Ramsey County Emergency Communications Center, LexisNexis, or another third-party vendor rather than the City of Maplewood."

The letter was signed by Administrative Lieutenant Michael J. Dugas, who had been copied on the email to LexisNexis two weeks earlier.

Maplewood's contract does not describe what leaves the department's records system. It requires the department to send its data "with reasonable promptness and consistency" and leaves the rest to the technical documents. By the department's account, those documents sit with LexisNexis. By LexisNexis's account, they are not producible.

Documents: LexisNexis email thread and the full request and response on MuckRock.