Cleveland has spent years declaring that immigrants are essential to its population, workforce and economic future. Yet when the results are measured, the city and region built a more effective infrastructure for tracking immigrants than for attracting them.
Newly released records showed that Cleveland’s Flock license-plate-reader network was searched nearly 2,000 times in 2025 using terms associated with immigration or ICE. Cleveland Heights records revealed another 1,783 immigration-related searches through data collected by only 20 cameras. Most of those searches came from agencies outside Ohio.
The stated reasons included “immigration enforcement” and “immigration overstay.”
Cleveland officials did not purchase these cameras to enforce immigration law. Police say automated license-plate readers help investigate homicides, shootings, stolen vehicles and other serious crimes. Those public-safety uses deserve serious consideration.
But civil immigration enforcement is not ordinary crime fighting. Someone 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 cannot distinguish between a vehicle connected to a murder suspect and one driven by a home-health aide accused only of overstaying a visa. The vehicle may belong to a U.S.-citizen spouse, employer, friend or relative. Repeated searches can expose where a family lives, where someone works, worships, receives medical care or picks up children.
The danger is no longer 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 should make Cleveland especially cautious about allowing locally collected location data to support civil immigration enforcement.
But the deeper problem is not limited to surveillance.
Cleveland has spent nearly two decades saying immigrants are indispensable to the region’s revival. Its political, corporate and philanthropic leaders have celebrated newcomers as workers, entrepreneurs, taxpayers and neighborhood residents. Yet they never built an immigrant-attraction strategy equal to the scale of Cleveland’s demographic and economic needs.
I know that history personally. I helped launch Global Cleveland because I believed international migration could become a central part of Northeast Ohio’s economic-development strategy.
The original vision was ambitious: recruit skilled workers and entrepreneurs, retain international graduates, repopulate neighborhoods, help employers fill jobs and connect immigrant buyers with viable businesses whose owners were preparing to retire.
Global Cleveland has done valuable work welcoming newcomers, connecting international talent with employers and supporting a more inclusive region. But a nonprofit cannot create a powerful regional movement without sustained political, corporate and philanthropic backing.
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History describes that struggle candidly. Global Cleveland was launched in 2011 to promote population and economic growth by attracting people from around the world. But 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 necessarily concentrated much of its work on welcoming, connecting and educating.
Those functions matter. But welcoming people who already live here is not the same as attracting enough new residents to reverse a demographic trajectory that has been moving downward for generations. Cleveland’s population peaked at 914,808 in 1950. Two decades ago, Mayor Jane Campbell set a goal of restoring the city above 500,000 residents by 2010 and identified 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.
Cleveland’s regional leadership never assembled the coalition that genuine immigrant attraction required: hospitals, universities, manufacturers, chambers of commerce, foundations, labor organizations, neighborhood groups and elected officials united behind a funded campaign for international-graduate retention, immigrant entrepreneurship, business succession and place-based visas.
The region also failed to create the shared-growth strategy needed to address legitimate concerns in Black Cleveland. 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.
Cleveland could have connected immigrant attraction with Black workforce development, Black and immigrant 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.
Instead, Cleveland avoided the difficult political work.
The immigrant-growth strategy remained largely aspirational.
The surveillance system did not.
Cleveland’s immigrant strategy lacked sustained funding, political muscle, federal advocacy and measurable recruitment goals. Its surveillance infrastructure had cameras, contracts, databases, national connectivity and thousands of documented searches.
That contrast should trouble every regional leader who has described immigrants as essential to Cleveland’s future.
Greater Cleveland added only 2,539 residents between July 2024 and July 2025. 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.
Those 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.
Cleveland City Council recently approved a six-month extension of the city’s Flock contract while the officials consider its next steps. That creates an opportunity to do more than change vendors.
Council 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. Agencies that misrepresent their purposes should permanently lose access.
But closing the Flock loopholes addresses only half of Cleveland’s failure.
Regional leaders must finally build the immigrant-growth strategy they have discussed for years: 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. It can control what happens to data collected on Cleveland streets. It can also decide whether immigrant attraction will remain civic rhetoric or become actual economic-development policy.
A city searching for new residents should not help the federal government search for them.
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