The Associated Press investigation, based on interviews with eight former government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity and on reviews of thousands of pages of court and government records, describes a Border Patrol surveillance approach that relies on both technology and data-driven referrals to local police. AP reported that drivers can be pulled over for routine-sounding reasons, then find themselves searched and questioned aggressively after the stop connects them to an intelligence request generated by the predictive system.
AP said the predictive intelligence program was built to identify people the agency deems suspicious, using a model that looks beyond single incidents and instead evaluates travel patterns. The investigation reported that Border Patrol cameras and an algorithm take in information about where a vehicle came from, where it is going and which route it took, and that flagged vehicles can lead federal agents to direct or influence stops by other law enforcement. AP reported that agents may also flag local law enforcement for additional attention, depending on what they see in the intelligence feeds.
For years, Border Patrol operated primarily at the borders, AP said, but the investigation described a quiet expansion of surveillance into the country’s interior. AP reported that the system was started about a decade ago to fight illegal border-related activity including the trafficking of drugs and people and that it has grown over the past five years. In AP’s reporting, the end result is a mass surveillance network with an “American focus: cars,” rather than surveillance confined to a narrow set of suspected individuals.
AP described specific instances where the process appeared to begin with a technology-driven tip and then be carried out on local roads. In one case described by AP, truck driver Lorenzo Gutierrez Lugo was pulled over by Kingsville, Texas, police after a local officer cited the truck’s speed, but AP reported that the stop functioned as a pretext after Border Patrol requested it. AP said documents and court records described Border Patrol as requesting the stop based on license plate reader data and as suspecting the vehicle could contain contraband, even though authorities ultimately found no contraband.
AP reported that Gutierrez Lugo was interrogated after Border Patrol requested the stop and arrived to assist. The investigation said the driver consented to a search of his car and that the search turned up no contraband, but that Richard Beltran arrested Gutierrez Lugo on suspicion of money laundering and engaging in organized criminal activity because the driver was carrying thousands of dollars in cash. AP said no criminal charges were ultimately brought, and that prosecutors’ efforts to seize the cash, vehicle and trailer as contraband were later dropped.
Gutierrez Lugo’s employer, Luis Barrios, told AP he was taken aback by what he said was the treatment of his employee and the truck’s trailer. Barrios said in the AP report that he hires people with work authorization and that the outcome showed the driver’s innocence. AP quoted Barrios saying, “We did everything right and had nothing to hide, and that was ultimately what they found,” adding that he estimated spending $20,000 in legal fees to clear his driver’s name and get the trailer out of impound.
AP also described how federal-local cooperation showed up in a separate Texas case involving a driver identified as Alek Schott. The investigation said federal agents observed that Schott traveled from Houston to Carrizo Springs overnight and that, based on their information, he stayed overnight in a hotel and met a female colleague before driving to a business meeting. AP said Border Patrol asked for the stop, and that Bexar County sheriff’s deputies held Schott by the side of the road for more than an hour, searched his car and found nothing.
The AP report said that in court testimony and documents in Schott’s lawsuit, a Bexar County deputy, Joel Babb, described why the traffic stop could happen and how Border Patrol’s surveillance operated. AP quoted Babb in a lawsuit deposition saying, “The beautiful thing about the Texas Traffic Code is there’s thousands of things you can stop a vehicle for.” AP also reported that Babb testified that federal agents “actually watch travel patterns on the highway” through license plate scans and other surveillance technologies and that he believed “they have a lot of toys over there on the federal side.”
AP reported that the sheriff’s office declined to comment on the Schott case because of pending litigation and referred questions to the district attorney, which did not respond. The AP investigation said Schott’s case was pending in federal court in Texas and that Schott told AP, “I didn’t know it was illegal to drive in Texas.” AP also said Babb’s communications with federal agents appeared in evidence produced during discovery in the lawsuit, including recovered messages from a group chat that AP obtained through public records requests.
According to AP, the surveillance program’s reach includes hidden and overt license plate readers placed in the border region and beyond. AP said Border Patrol places cameras disguised in traffic safety equipment or jobsite equipment and that AP photographer visits in October found most of the hidden equipment remained in place after permit filings. AP said AP obtained permits filed with Arizona and Michigan for permission to place cameras on state-owned land, while Texas, California and other border states did not provide documents in response to AP public records requests.
AP also reported that the Border Patrol’s parent agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, obtained authorization for a domestic license plate reader program in 2017, according to a Department of Homeland Security policy document. AP said the document described hidden license plate readers as being used “for a set period of time” during an investigation, with covert cameras removed when the illicit activity stopped. AP’s investigation, however, said that interviews, police reports and court documents suggested license plate readers became permanent fixtures in the border region.
The Associated Press reported that CBP, in a budget request to Congress for fiscal year 2024, described its Conveyance Monitoring and Predictive Recognition System, or CMPRS, as collecting license plate images and matching them against “hot lists” to assist in identifying travel patterns indicative of illegal border-related activities. AP also said developer jobs had been posted in recent months to modernize its license plate surveillance system and that CBP and Border Patrol sectors added intelligence units to analyze license plate reader data and connect commercial systems to a national network.
Border Patrol’s partnerships expanded further, AP reported, using license plate reader networks run by the Drug Enforcement Administration and access to license plate reader systems sold by private companies. AP said documents described Border Patrol as able to look at routes that included cities such as Dallas and Little Rock in a vehicle’s history before it headed south of San Antonio. AP also reported that Border Patrol had access at times to data from private vendors including Rekor, Vigilant Solutions and Flock Safety, and that one vendor, Flock Safety, told AP it paused a pilot program “for now” while declining to describe volume or type of data shared.
CBP defended its use of license plate readers. In the AP report, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it uses the technology to help identify threats and disrupt criminal networks and that it is governed by a “stringent, multi-layered policy framework,” as well as federal law and constitutional protections. AP reported CBP also said that “for national security reasons” it does not detail the specific operational applications, and that while Border Patrol primarily operates within 100 miles of the border, it is legally allowed “to operate anywhere in the United States.”
Some legal experts said the scale of surveillance could raise constitutional issues. AP quoted Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University, saying courts have started to recognize that “large-scale surveillance technology that’s capturing everyone and everywhere at every time” might be unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment. AP also quoted Nicole Ozer, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy at UC Law San Francisco, saying surveillance systems can amount to “dragnet surveillance of Americans” and that they “do not make communities safer.”
AP said the analysis-driven surveillance fits into a broader shift in the way CBP operates, tying Border Patrol’s license plate monitoring to a domestic intelligence posture. The investigation described how CBP’s access to information from ports of entry, airports and intelligence centers gives the agency a broader role than local law enforcement, and how agents use “whisper stops” to influence motorist encounters without fully revealing the federal intelligence basis in written records. AP also reported that Operation Stonegarden, a grant program, has provided hundreds of millions of dollars over time to local police and sheriffs for surveillance gear such as automated license plate readers and camera-equipped drones, and that under President Donald Trump Congress allocated $450 million for Stonegarden over four fiscal years.
How many people are affected by this technology-driven approach remains unclear, AP reported, but the investigation said legal challenges are already underway. It said some local enforcement efforts also tried to conceal the federal role in passing intelligence, using language like “subsequent to prior knowledge” in reports to avoid disclosing too much detail. AP reported that prosecutors have pursued lawsuits to seize vehicles and cash in cases linked to “suspicious” travel patterns and that it reviewed body-worn camera footage and police records showing officers used aggressive questioning after stops connected to the predictive surveillance referrals.
In a wider view, AP said the Border Patrol system described in the investigation reflects a transformation of immigration enforcement into an expanded domestic surveillance operation. The report said the predictive surveillance program has expanded beyond border policing, reached metropolitan areas and connected local enforcement through grants and information-sharing arrangements. AP said Border Patrol has built a surveillance network that, according to the investigation, can flag ordinary drivers and lead to stops based on data-driven assessments rather than on direct suspicion that a specific person has already committed a crime.