It’s not clear, though, that Catalan-Ramirez’s due process suit would have been successful if it had proceeded. There are two types of precedent for challenging government databases, and the facts of Catalan-Ramirez’s case don’t quite fit either of them, said Aziz Huq, a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago. In one set of cases, individuals challenge their inclusion on a government list because it harms their reputation, as in a 1976 case in which police distributed “active shoplifter” fliers pointing to a man against whom shoplifting charges were later dropped. The man sued the police, but the Supreme Court eventually ruled that his constitutional right to privacy had not been violated. In other words, Huq said, the court declared that “the due process clause does not protect your reputation.”

In the other type of cases, a government-run list is used for some sort of coercive government action, like the federal government’s no-fly list restricting access to air travel. Challenges to these lists have been moving through federal courts but have not yet reached the Supreme Court. Huq said that the no-fly list and Chicago police’s gang database are not exactly comparable: With the Chicago gang database, the body creating the list — the police department — is separate from the entity using it, ICE. And in watch-list cases, the government asserts that it has the right to deny people access to travel without any reason at all. In the gang database context, Huq said, the government does claim a legal basis for listing someone, even if it’s not always a persuasive one.

Catalan-Ramirez’s lawyers at the MacArthur Justice Center have filed a separate lawsuit challenging the gang database on behalf of Luis Pedrote-Salinas, whose parents brought him to the United States as a child and who is now in removal proceedings. The city has moved to dismiss that lawsuit, arguing in part that even if police did inaccurately label Pedrote-Salinas as a gang member, “due process provides no guarantee against police errors.” The city did not specifically address the allegation that the police department shares information from its gang database with ICE, but it did emphasize its “strong interest in maintaining information about gang affiliations.” That lawsuit is ongoing and is anti-gang database activists’ best chance at lifting the veil on the process of collecting and disseminating gang information.

The outcome of the case may depend on whether the court finds that the sharing of information between CPD and ICE is unlawful. “I find it hard to believe that a city like Chicago doesn’t have an interest in acquiring that information. That seems unlikely,” Huq said. “Then the question is, does that person have an interest in challenging it? Well, it depends on how the information is being used.”

Read more at The Intercept