Dear Speaker Johnson, Minority Leader Jeffries, and members of Congress:

As your constituent, I am in strong opposition to S.1404, the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act (CORCA). While we recognize that organized retail theft is a concern that warrants discussion, CORCA is the wrong response. This legislation would dramatically expand the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) role in domestic law enforcement, authorizing sweeping new authority to collect, analyze, and share Americans’ personal data without meaningful civil liberties safeguards, adequate oversight, and accountability mechanisms should DHS abuse this power.

Congress should not expand the footprint of DHS, which has already demonstrated it cannot be trusted with expanded surveillance authority. Over the past year alone, the agency has obtained sensitive personal data from Medicaid, the IRS, Social Security, private data brokers, police departments, tech companies, and more. It has spent millions on intrusive surveillance tools tracking the movements and locations of private citizens, capturing that information in massive databases and secret watchlists used to surveil protesters and legal observers. DHS has operated far beyond its original mandate, and CORCA would only reward this pattern of overreach with even greater power.

The bill’s data-sharing framework is dangerously overbroad. The legislation creates a new DHS-run data-sharing system that lacks sufficient civil liberty protections. The bill authorizes broad information-sharing across federal, state, local, and private-sector entities, including the disclosure of confidential information that would otherwise be protected under federal law if deemed “operationally necessary.” This term is never defined, nor does the bill include any standards governing how personally identifiable information may be collected, used, stored, or deleted. Further, CORCA provides no mechanism for people to know whether their data was collected, let alone access or challenge those records, and it does not require DHS to demonstrate that data will be used for specific investigative purposes. The default is broad collection and dissemination across federal, state, local, and private-sector entities.
CORCA would quietly construct a massive public-private surveillance network. The bill encourages extensive information- sharing between DHS and private corporations, including retailers and transportation companies. Many of these companies may be the same ones that have lobbied extensively for its passage. This provision risks enabling the quiet construction of a vast public-private surveillance network in which corporate data would flow into federal law enforcement systems without constitutional safeguards. Such arrangements raise serious concerns of racial profiling in retail environments and government misuse of commercially collected data for surveillance purposes.

The bill deepens DHS’s influence over state and local policing through grants and open-ended cooperation agreements. CORCA authorizes DHS to enter agreements with local law enforcement agencies—whether or not they already receive federal funding—and to recommend ways to expand existing grants, regardless of what those grants currently require. This gives DHS leverage to impose more intrusive data collection and surveillance practices on jurisdictions that cannot afford to refuse federal dollars. These provisions also threaten the ability of localities to tailor their own responses to retail theft, which is not a one-size-fits-all issue and is often driven by economic need rather than organized criminal activity.

CORCA entrenches DHS and ICE at the center of domestic law enforcement. The bill positions Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) as the hub of a new national intelligence apparatus focused on organized retail crime, whose leader will be appointed by the director of ICE. This further collapses the distinction between domestic policing and immigration enforcement. HSI is now forced to work with ICE on removal operations, and HSI agents say their connection to ICE has undermined their ability to do investigative work. HSI is intended to investigate transnational crime, and while it has made recent forays into domestic retail theft, Congress should be incredibly wary of permanently authorizing this expansion.

The bill’s sunset provision is illusory. Although the crime coordination center would sunset after seven years, CORCA includes no requirement to dismantle data-sharing systems, delete collected information, or reverse any entrenched surveillance practices. History shows that once such infrastructure is built, it is rarely undone.

Congress should not respond to concerns about retail theft by handing more power to an agency that has skirted accountability and has a documented record of surveillance overreach. Effective solutions must be carefully targeted, address the root causes of theft, support impacted workers and businesses, and uphold everyone’s constitutional rights. CORCA does none of this.

For these reasons, I urge you to vote no on CORCA and any other legislation that would expand DHS’s footprint.