Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting

Public records show Indiana State Police troopers have helped US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrest commercial truckers at weigh stations and on the road.

Morgan Watkins with the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting has more.

President Donald Trump is cracking down on immigrants in the commercial trucking industry, saying it's due to safety concerns.

State and local law enforcement, especially the Indiana State Police, are helping.

New federal data shows state and local law enforcement are helping U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement make more arrests.

Morgan Watkins of the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting has more on the stats from our region.

State and local officers can be deputized as immigration agents under ICE's 287G program.

And data show they've made more ICE arrests lately in the Appalachian Mid-South region.

Across the Appalachian Mid-South, local law enforcement are doing more to support U.S. immigration and customs enforcement in detaining people.

Morgan Watkins with the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting analyzed the latest data on ICE arrests in Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia.

I spoke with her about what she learned.

Morgan, you reviewed data that ICE provided through a records request to the Deportation Data Project at the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, Los Angeles.

In Kentucky, for example, public records show four county jails earned $2 million or more as of April by holding people for ICE during Trump's second term.

A few jailers told me the ICE earnings help offset the sizable costs of running their jail.

That was Morgan Watkins with the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting.

This report was supported by the Data-Driven Reporting Project and done in partnership with the Appalachian Mid-South Newsroom.

A

top Jefferson County public schools official unilaterally tried to cancel a student theater production, according to new records obtained by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting.

Jess Clark has the story.

Chief Academic Officer Nathan Balasubramanian made the call to cancel a production of Ragtime by students at DuPont Manual High School, according to emails obtained by KYCIR.

Good evening, I'm Bill Bryant, and we welcome you to Comment on Kentucky, a look back at and some analysis of the week's news in the Commonwealth.

And the guests on our panel of working Kentucky journalists tonight are Hannah Pinski, political reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader, McKenna Horsley, politics reporter for the Kentucky Lantern, And Morgan Watkins, health and environment reporter for the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting.

Also tonight, how will Kentucky spend its money from a settlement with social media giant Meta? Let's begin with Senator Mitch McConnell's return to the Senate.

He came to the Capitol Monday for the first time since he fell back on June 14th.

And

it's not unusual for a lot of out of state like searches to be made by external agencies like that is part of the whole flock network.

Flocks pitch is like when you buy our cameras, you get can can choose to hook yourself up to a national network of other police departments cameras and you can kind of search data so that's like the pitch for why the cameras are so powerful but it also has gotten a lot of pushback even not just like out-of-state agencies searching but even just should any agency beyond the police department that has these cameras be searching it like at the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting like we got into the Louisville's audits and found that you know an officer had given his login to a local DEA agent who then did searches on immigration so it's sort of like How much control do the police departments that are running these cameras have over the way that the data that they're collecting is used? And people are very up in arms about it.

I mean, you've seen here in Kentucky, like Newport decided to get rid of their not.

With that transformation, districts have handed over a vast amount of student data to for-profit companies, and people are starting to worry about how companies are using deeply personal information on students.

The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting's Jess Clark set out to find out what protections are in place in the state's largest school district.

Students and staff in Jefferson County Public Schools are getting acquainted this year with more than 600 technologies approved for use, from testing software like iReady.

Hey there, friends.

To Google Classroom, to niche applications like this one that lets students take virtual Tybo lessons.

That technology is getting acquainted with students and staff, too.

The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting reviewed 49 data privacy agreements signed last school year that detail a range of student information JCPS allows tech companies to collect.

birthdates, test scores, interactions with websites, and deeply personal information like family economic status and ethnicity, even homelessness and placement in foster care.