The Nevada DMV communicated with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over the encrypted messaging app Signal for its work on a federal task force that it says does not relate to immigration enforcement, despite assurances made in court earlier this month that the agency conducts no “official business” on the app.

J.D. Decker, the head of a DMV division focused on identity fraud, said in a court filing earlier this month the correspondence was tied to a federal task force to apprehend criminals who have fraudulently masked their identities. This task force includes at least one ICE officer.

“To my knowledge, [the division] has not communicated with ICE using the Signal app outside of our participation on the [task force],” Decker wrote. 

However, Decker also said in the filing that DMV employees have never communicated with ICE “for the purposes of immigration enforcement.” He added that the task force stopped using Signal  — which can be harder for records searchers to track down because it is not installed on agency computers — last April.

Nevada law prohibits the DMV from providing personal information to governments for the purposes of immigration enforcement. 

Athar Haseebullah, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada (ACLU), isn’t buying the DMV’s explanations. He said in an interview that Gov. Joe Lombardo (R) should launch an internal investigation into the agency’s use of Signal.

“To say that ‘we’re communicating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement about something unrelated to immigration or customs enforcement’ seems to be beyond a stretch,” he said Monday. “There needs to be some level of accountability here.”

Lombardo’s office and the DMV declined to comment.

The filings were required by Carson City Judge Kristin Luis earlier this month. She is presiding over a lawsuit filed by the ACLU over how the DMV responded to public records requests for its communications with ICE, and she previously criticized the agency’s records response.

The ACLU originally received records indicating employees from both agencies had communicated over Signal, but its request for Signal communications yielded no records.

The Nevada Current first reported the new filings on Friday.

The revelations raise new questions surrounding how ICE communicates with the DMV, which would have information on undocumented immigrants. 

Nevada is one of 19 states that allow for driver authorization cards, which give driving privileges to people, such as undocumented immigrants, who cannot meet identity requirements for a standard license. There are more than 416,000 active cards in Nevada, the DMV said.

At the hearing earlier this month, a lawyer for the attorney general’s office who is representing the DMV said that the agency does not do “official business” on the app. 

However, court documents filed a week later said that these statements, “while believed to be accurate at the time they were made, have proven to be inaccurate.” The filings also note that although Signal is not an approved application at the DMV, there is no explicit restriction on using the app.

The agency’s use of Signal — which allows users to auto-delete messages — also raises questions about if it is running afoul of state public records law.

“If every government employee is simply going to Signal, it defeats the purpose of even having a public records law in place,” Haseebullah said.

Decker added in his declaration that no DMV employees have this auto-delete function turned on, which Haseebullah said he does not believe because “there’s a track record now of misrepresentations.”

It’s unclear whether the messages related to the task force can even be released. The U.S. Marshals Service, which runs the task force, has archived any Signal chats and must sign off on any public disclosures, according to Decker’s filing. 

The attorney general’s office has instructed the DMV to request those archived chats.

The DMV also previously asserted that it produced all documents related to the ACLU’s records request, but the attorney general’s office said in its latest filing that this was also inaccurate. The DMV did not produce certain documents for confidentiality purposes, and the attorney general’s office was in the process of reviewing the documents.

Both sides are waiting for the judge to determine the next steps after reviewing the filings.