By Dana Gentry, Nevada Current
This piece was originally published in the Nevada Current
The Nevada Dept. of Motor Vehicles provided inaccurate information in a legal proceeding about DMV chats with federal immigration officials via Signal, an encrypted messaging platform, according to a document obtained by the Current.
The mistake was inadvertent, the Nevada Attorney General’s office wrote in a supplemental legal filing.
The AG’s office, which is representing the DMV in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, wrote that the DMV, in a discovery request from ACLU, “represented that ‘any Signal messages are not used to conduct public business at the DMV.’”
Additionally, the document says, at a hearing earlier this month Deputy Attorney General Abigail Pace “represented that the DMV does not use Signal to conduct official DMV business,” Chief Deputy Jessica Whelan wrote in a filing with the court.
“These statements, while believed to be accurate at the time they were made, have proven to be inaccurate based on information learned following the February 6, 2025 hearing,” Whelan acknowledged.
The ACLU sued last year to determine the extent of the DMV’s cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
The DMV had maintained it has no record of the Signal chats because the platform is not on the DMV server and no official business was conducted there.
Nevada is one of 19 states and the District of Columbia that offer DMV-issued identification cards to undocumented immigrants.
Earlier this month, Carson District Judge Kristin Luis gave the DMV five days to turn over public records and department policies requested as part of the lawsuit after the agency produced heavily redacted records and failed to provide some of the discovery requests.
The DMV also admitted its enforcement officers communicate with ICE via a task force, the U.S. Marshals Service Southern Nevada Violent Crime Offenders Task Force, but not for immigration enforcement.
The task force “at one point used the Signal app for communications between task force members during the course of tracking down violent fugitives in the field,” wrote J.D. Decker, chief of the DMV’s Compliance Division. Decker wrote that to his knowledge, DMV enforcement officers have “not communicated with ICE using the Signal app outside of our participation on the USMS Southern Nevada Violent Crime Offenders Task Force, nor has CED (compliance enforcement division) participated or communicated with ICE…for immigration enforcement in any way.”
There are no records of the task force’s communications with ICE, Decker wrote.
ACLU of Nevada Executive Director Athar Haseebullah says the filings “demonstrate that the agency has in fact used Signal to communicate before and also has used the application to communicate with ICE.”
He said it’s not clear to him “how the DMV can simply walk back its erroneous representations about not using Signal to communicate as recently as two weeks ago,” adding “it’s even more bizarre that they’d expect the public to just take their word for things.”
He called on the DMV to “turn over the records to the public and make clear the full extent of what they’ve hidden for a year as they’ve attempted to stall this process. This is your government at work.”
