The Combating Organized Retail Crime Act was first introduced in 2022, during a wave of panic about so-called organized retail crime. The term refers to systematic, high-value theft at retailers, in contrast to petty shoplifting.

Organized retail crime became a national political flash point in 2021 and 2022 amid a well-financed backlash to criminal justice reforms passed after the law enforcement murder of George Floyd. Property crime rates were rising nationally too, contributing to the anxiety.

The retail lobby, led by its primary lobbying muscle, the National Retail Federation, capitalized on the moment to announce a fight against “rising retail crime.” Viral “smash and grab” videos circulated in right-wing media, which was reporting breathlessly on rings of criminals targeting retailers. The industry advocated for harsher state laws penalizing theft, dozens of which successfully passed between 2021 and 2025. Police departments and prosecutors ramped up collaboration with retailers, expanding surveillance.

But despite the panic, it was never clear that there was any organized retail crime crisis at all. Though ambitious retail theft schemes certainly exist, the scope of the problem is uncertain, thanks in part to a lack of reliable data differentiating organized retail theft from other, more common forms of theft, like shoplifting and theft by retail employees.

The numbers that did exist did not show any particular growing problem. Between 2015 and 2022, the amount of consumer retail goods lost each year by theft or other means — termed “shrink” by the industry — remained relatively stable, according to the National Retail Federation’s own data.

In fact, as Retail Dive uncovered in 2023, the retail lobby was using inflated numbers to claim that organized retail theft was out of control. The National Retail Federation asserted in a report that year that organized crime led to nearly $45 billion in retail losses in a twelve-month period. However, the figure was likely at least an order of magnitude too high, experts said, and paled in comparison to retailers’ losses from low-level shoplifting. (The National Retail Federation ultimately retracted the claim.)

In 2022, as the retail theft panic reached a fever pitch, Congress first introduced the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act, proposing to create a new information-sharing cell within the Department of Homeland Security to combat the apparent crisis.

From the outset, the legislation had the backing of major retailers. Starting in 2023, the National Retail Federation and the big-box stores it represented — Home Depot, Target, and Walmart among them — lobbied heavily on the bill. But the legislation stalled in Congress; it never made it out of committee.

Then, last year, lawmakers introduced a new version of the legislation. The bill was largely the same — it included the expanded information-sharing powers for ICE and the same broadening of federal theft offenses — but it added a new target, alongside organized retail theft: supply chain crime.

Over the last year, trucking companies, big box stores, and insurance companies have all seized on cargo theft as a new bogeyman. The bill “is the only viable federal path to disrupting criminal organizations,” the National Retail Federation wrote in April. “A nationwide surge in cargo theft” meant that Congress must pass the legislation urgently, the lobbyists warned.

But, like the organized retail theft panic that inspired the legislation, the data behind claims of rising cargo theft doesn’t exactly add up.

The best — and perhaps only — source for cargo theft data is an analytics service called CargoNet, also known as Verisk, which collects related incident reports from law enforcement, truckers, and insurers. It’s run by the National Insurance Crime Bureau, which represents the insurers who pay for the cargo losses (and who have been jacking up cargo insurance prices in recent years).

“Everybody gets their numbers from us,” explained Keith Lewis, vice president of operations at Verisk. Indeed, CargoNet statistics are cited explicitly in the bill text of the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act.

Those numbers do not quite live up to the cargo theft histrionics. Only an extraordinarily tiny fraction of the freight moved across the country each year — around 0.005 percent — is documented as stolen annually.

In 2025, CargoNet estimated the value of cargo lost to theft across the United States and Canada at $725 million, far from the $60 billion figure cited by industry to lobby for the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act. In comparison, trucks move an estimated $13.7 trillion in goods annually in the United States alone, according to the most recent numbers from the Department of Transportation.

“You talk to different people, and if they’re not in the freight fraud game, they’ll point out — truthfully — that it is incredibly insignificant,” one supply chain logistics executive admitted on an industry podcast in April. “As a percentage, statistically, it doesn’t matter.”

A common refrain in the industry is that the numbers look so small because cargo theft is underreported, given that in some cases, there may be little chance of recovery. But it’s hard to verify such claims. According to the American Transportation Research Institute, around 82 percent of trucking companies and 53 percent of logistics firms say that they report all thefts to law enforcement. Then again, perhaps they are underreporting their own underreporting.

There is some truth to the claim that cargo theft incidents are going up. CargoNet data, reproduced in a report last year from the American Transportation Research Institute, showed a sharp increase in cargo theft beginning in 2023, after eight years of a relatively steady trend line. The numbers continued to increase until the end of 2025, when they began to decline.

Why may these incidents be rising? Though it’s hard to be certain, one clear factor is fraud. For years, fraud made up under 10 percent of cargo thefts, as opposed to so-called straight theft, the more traditional highway robbery associated with cargo theft. But starting in 2023, the same year that saw a spike in cargo theft, fraud-related theft increased to over 25 percent.

“Theft by fraud is what’s really taken off,” said Lewis at Verisk.

Such theft typically targets logistics firms, which coordinate shipments from afar, rather than truckers on the road. Thieves pose as legitimate trucking companies looking to pick up cargo, sometimes using stolen identities. Once they’re cleared, they pick up the load and disappear, reselling the goods — most commonly food, electronics, and auto parts — on secondary markets.

Lewis said he believed the increase in theft by fraud was driven in part by the integration of AI and other forms of automation into brokers’ vetting processes.

“You lose the whole vetting of, ‘I know this company, I’ve been doing business with them for years,’” Lewis said. “Now you’ve turned your fleet over to an AI service, and they’re matching you up with the trucks. . . .  and you don’t know who these people are or if you’re going to even get paid.”

“The bad guys have found basically the hole in the fence, and they’ve exploited that,” he added.

The Combating Organized Retail Crime Act does not specifically reference or address fraud-related cargo theft. There is virtually no mention in the bill of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the agency that oversees commercial trucking, despite the fact that the agency’s understaffing and flimsy industry oversight have, as 60 Minutes reported earlier this year, allowed trucking fraud to go unchecked.

Instead, the legislation puts the responsibility in the hands of ICE Homeland Security Investigations, the agency’s criminal investigation wing, which has a broad mandate and little accountability.

The Combating Organized Retail Crime Act’s central proposal is the creation of a new information-sharing hub within ICE, the Organized Retail and Supply Chain Crime Coordination Center, which would bring together agents from ICE, the US Secret Service, Customs and Border Protection, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and other federal agencies to work on the issue.

The new coordination center would arrive as the Trump administration takes steps to reorganize and centralize federal law enforcement. The White House’s new Homeland Security Task Force, jointly led by ICE Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI, revolves around a central information-sharing hub for federal agencies: the National Coordination Center.

Although the Homeland Security Task Force, which has regional branches across the country, is ostensibly focused on cartels and organized crime, there are already indications of mission creep. Procurement documents obtained by the Lever suggest that the National Coordination Center is targeting undocumented immigrants regardless of any alleged connection to organized criminal activity.

Advocates worry that a similar phenomenon might occur should Congress greenlight the Organized Retail and Supply Chain Crime Coordination Center, especially given the Trump administration’s unorthodox, sledgehammer approach to redirecting federal resources in order to ramp up deportations.

The leader of the new coordination center, for instance, would be appointed by ICE, a proposal that “collapses the distinction between domestic policing and immigration enforcement,” a coalition of forty civil rights organizations wrote in a May 11 letter to lawmakers raising concerns about the bill.

“[The Department of Homeland Security] has operated far beyond its original mandate, and [the bill] would only reward this pattern of overreach with even greater power,” the organizations continued.

At the same time, the proposed bill lowers the bar for bringing federal charges related to retail crime, which activists worry would make it easier for people to get caught in the Department of Homeland Security’s dragnet. As the May letter noted, retail theft “is not a one-size-fits-all issue and is often driven by economic need rather than organized criminal activity,” and effective solutions may vary place by place.

But the most alarming element of the proposal to civil rights advocates is its mandate for information sharing between the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector. ICE and private companies will collaborate “on investigations and loss prevention activities,” the bill says, and will exchange “investigative information on such threats.”

To do so, the legislation grants ICE a broad exemption from federal law to collect confidential and proprietary data from retailers. The agency will, at its discretion and with few guardrails, be allowed to collect this information if it deems it “operationally necessary” — a loophole that is “quite broad,” Cotter said.

Such information is plentiful, thanks to big US retailers, which over the last decade have become data-collection machines. Walmart deploys body cameras on some of its employees, compiling untold hours of video footage. In recent months, Home Depot and Lowe’s have expanded their use of license plate readers. Loyalty programs and rewards cards track an individual’s purchasing history. Grocery stores collect biometric data. Sophisticated, predictive video analytics are deployed on the endless stream of security footage.

Already, there are questions about how ICE has used information from big-box retailers for immigration enforcement. The use of license plate readers in Home Depot parking lots — a target for immigration agents, as they are frequented by day laborers — has led some company investors to worry that the data will be funneled to ICE.

A centralized information-sharing hub created by the passage of the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act could give ICE easier access to this kind of private-sector data. It “formalizes that information sharing relationship between [the Department of Homeland Security] and private companies,” Cotter said.

For the Trump administration, the hub would be another branch of its newly empowered security state, further entangling ICE in the daily lives of people across the country.