A new bill likely to pass the United States Senate would create a new crime coordination center for a subdivision of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to fight organized retail crime, worrying civil rights advocates. Advocacy groups like the National Immigration Legal Center, Vera Instit ute and the American Civil Liberties Union contend the legislation’s real impacts will federalize prosecution of shoplifters, advance federal immigration enforcement initiatives, encourage private sector surveillance and consolidate federal access to private sector surveillance systems. However, retail industry leaders have for years pushed for congressional action on organized retail and supply chain crime, which they say costs businesses billions of dollars per year. The Combating Organized Retail Crime Act has the support of hundreds of leading retail companies and Congressional leaders of both parties. Retailers say the legislation is aimed at taking down sophisticated retail theft groups rather than shoplifters. An FBI report in 2025 found that individuals participating in “flash mob”-style retail crimes from 2020 to 2024 stole more than $8 million worth of products.  David Johnston, vice president of retail asset protection and operations for the National Retail Federation, argued the collaboration that CORCA would create for retail crime is necessary to help local authorities track down the individuals Johnston said are organizing such crimes, who may be operating far from where the store-level crime occurred. In addition to shoplifting, Johnston said organized crime groups are targeting cargo shipments — which the retail industry says can cost up to $6.6 billion a year — as well as performing supply chain thefts, expanding digitally-based scams, and reselling stolen products. “These groups have become so sophisticated, the breadth of these groups have become transnational to a degree,” Johnston said. “It’s very similar to what we do with human trafficking, drug trafficking, and other crimes that expand across our nation and even our borders.” Heidi Altman, vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, said that, if enacted, CORCA would “create one more pipeline directly towards detention and deportation.”  “HSI has been right at the center of some of the Trump administration’s most brazen and abusive enforcement operations, including those targeting children and parents and loved ones who have stepped forward to care for children who arrive in the United States unaccompanied or without someone to care for them,” Altman said. HSI is nominally different than ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations, but in the past year ICE has blurred the boundaries separating its subdivisions.  Libertarian think tank the Cato Institute reported in Sept. 2025 that ICE had diverted almost 90% of its 7,100 HSI agents toward immigration enforcement. Affidavits written by an HSI agent were essential to obtaining the administrative warrants that DHS used to justify its raid on the Nutrition Bar Confectioners facility in Cato, NY — where armed DHS agents questioned nearly 160 workers on their citizenship status, detained 57 workers and wrongfully deported some, and separated parents from children on the first day of school. “It boggles the mind that any member of Congress that is concerned about ICE’s lawlessness and abuses would support this bill,” Altman said. Bipartisan congressional support The U.S. House of Representatives in May passed the CORCA with strong bipartisan support; 360 representatives voted yes on the bill, with 59 Democrats and one Republican opposing the measure (21 congresspersons did not vote).  NY-22 Representative John Mannion, a Democrat, in a statement to Central Current, said that  CORCA provides law enforcement the necessary resources to respond to complex crimes that may involve interstate or foreign shipments. Mannion voted for the bill, which he said does not grant ICE any new data collection or immigration enforcement authority. “Organized retail crime has become increasingly sophisticated and prevalent, causing massive losses to businesses and the economy and disrupting the nation’s supply chain. We’ve heard from constituents in NY-22 directly impacted by these incidents,” Mannion wrote. Though Mannion supported the Laken Riley Act, a foundation for President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, he has become a frequent critic of ICE.  Earlier this year, Mannion called the agency a “personal paramilitary unit to the president” after DHS agents shot American citizen Daniel Pretti to death during the department’s immigration surge in Minnesota.  Since June, Mannion has been pressing DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to explain why ICE agents appeared at a Syracuse voting station on election day to confront a poll worker over a social media post calling for Johnathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed American citizen Renee Good in Minnesota, to be indicted. In his statement to Central Current, Mannion reiterated that ICE Homeland Security Investigations is separate from ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations, writing that HSI is “tasked with criminal investigations into the illegal movement of people and goods into the United States.” Altman rejected that defense, referencing a recent report from Reuters that found the Office of Refugee Resettlement — which is tasked with supporting unaccompanied minors arriving in the US — funneled sensitive information to HSI that led to 12,000 ICE arrests. “It is completely disingenuous to argue in any way that HSI remains separated or firewalled from civil immigration enforcement,” Altman said.  Kailee Buller, the Trump-endorsed Republican and former White House official vying to unseat Mannion, said in a statement to Central Current that she, like Mannion, would support the bill if she were in Congress. Buller in a statement said she opposes “Washington stuffing unrelated legislation into must-pass bills” but that she agreed with the effort to combat retail crime. After the bill cleared the House, almost two hundred companies and other stakeholders in June issued a joint letter applauding its passage and encouraging the Senate to swiftly pass CORCA. Ranking members of the Senate judiciary committee have offered the CORCA as an amendment to be included in the National Defense Authorization Act, an annual legislative package authorizing budgeting for national defense initiatives. One of several disclaimers throughout Walmart’s parking lot informs citizens they are being surveilled. Walmart has been a key backer of CORCA. Credit: Patrick McCarthy | Central Current If the Senate includes the CORCA in the NDAA, rather than holding an individual vote on the bill, the CORCA is more likely to become law. The authorizations within the NDAA expire at the close of each fiscal year, making passage of the NDAA an urgent priority for both chambers of Congress. A July YouGov poll commissioned by Vera Action found that voters overwhelmingly do not want the CORCA to be included in the NDAA, with 82% of polled voters supporting Congress voting on the legislation separately. Polled voters did approve of retailers sharing personal data with federal law enforcement entities on individuals who have not been charged with a crime, with only 19% responding that such data-sharing — a cornerstone of CORCA — is acceptable. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s office declined to comment on this story. The office of Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Congress’s top ranking Democrat, did not respond to a Central Current reporter’s requests for comment. A ‘Trojan horse’ As CORCA appears close to quietly becoming law, civil rights groups continue to sound the alarm.  The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights in July issued a joint letter urging the Senate to reject the legislation, and argued CORCA had no inherent connection to national security and thus should not be included in the NDAA. In the letter, the conference argued CORCA encourages surveillance by retail entities and merges with their networks an “expansive surveillance network” maintained by DHS. Members from the conference believe CORCA will disproportionately affect Black and Brown communities. The LCCHR and other critics of CORCA have said the bill lacks a meaningful definition of its nominal subject, organized retail crime.  Nina Patel, senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union (which signed the LCCHR’s July letter), suggested that “wide-ranging, deeply amorphous” definition is purposeful. By not explicitly defining what constitutes organized retail crime, Patel argued, the act achieves a broad expansion of ICE’s jurisdiction under the guise of addressing a particular type of crime. “What they lack so far is political will to get to Main Street and to do street level crime enforcement,” Patel said. “… It is a Trojan horse. It expands the ability of ICE. It gives cover to something they don’t have public support for.” The Council on Criminal Justice in July released a study of crime trends in recent years, which found that violent crimes and nonviolent crime rate in the first six months of 2026 are lower than crime rates in 2019. Shoplifting rates so far this year are 5% higher than the 2019 rate, an increase that advocates argue reflects the symptoms of an affordability crisis. Patel said that the private sector surveillance apparati that HSI, and consequently ICE, could leverage through the crime center that CORCA would create include biometric and facial recognition surveillance systems and automatic license plate reader systems, both of which are used by retail companies that operate stores throughout Central New York. ICE has routinely angled to access local license plate reader databases, especially through Flock Safety’s national network. DHS agents use a biometric and facial scanning phone app called Mobile Fortify to verify citizenship status, and biometric data from private sector surveillance can feed DHS’ databases. The legislation alters the threshold for federal theft, which is $5,000, by allowing prosecutors to aggregate any thefts that amount up to $5,000 in a calendar year. Patel said that could result in individuals who commit multiple low-value thefts in the course of a few months — which she said is generally indicative of someone facing dire financial circumstances — getting charged as organized retail criminals. “Not a single one of those thefts actually has to have a nexus with organized retail crime,” Patel said.  CORCA builds on the Laken Riley Act which similarly expanded ICE’s stated mission by making the penalties for shoplifting far more severe for non-citizens, Altman argued. Among other things, that act required DHS to detain “certain non-US nationals” who have been arrested for burglary, theft, larceny, and shoplifting. “You cannot at once stand up and say that you understand this agency to be violating the law, you understand it to be abusing and inflicting harms on your communities, and then vote yes on a bill that empowers this agency to oversee a wide-ranging multi-agency effort that has sprawling tentacles into the hearts of our communities and neighborhoods,” Altman said. Editor’s note: An original version of this story misidentified the vice president of retail asset protection and operations for the National Retail Federation as David Johnson. His name is David Johnston. This story has been updated to reflect this. The post Congress has a plan to fight retail crime. Advocacy groups call it a ‘Trojan horse’ to expand federal surveillance, deportation initiatives appeared first on Central Current. ...read more read less