The Border Patrol has built a mass surveillance system that monitors Americans’ daily actions using license plate readers and other technology. Started about a decade ago, it has expanded over the past five years. A man from Houston, who was stopped and subjected to a lengthy search because he made a quick overnight trip, is now asking that question in a lawsuit.

Secretive Border Patrol program is detaining US citizens for ‘suspicious’ travel
AP video, Published November 20, 2025
apnews.com - Secretive border patrol program is detaining US citizens for suspicious travel

Border Patrol is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with ‘suspicious’ travel patterns
"The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious, The Associated Press has found.

Here are Takeaways from the AP’s investigation: ...

“They are collecting mass amounts of information about who people are, where they go, what they do, and who they know … engaging in dragnet surveillance of Americans on the streets, on the highways, in their cities, in their communities,” Nicole Ozer, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy at UC Law San Francisco, said in response to the AP’s findings. “These surveillance systems do not make communities safer.” ...

In cases reviewed by the AP, local law enforcement sometimes tried to conceal the role the Border Patrol plays in passing along intelligence. Babb, the deputy who stopped Schott, testified he typically uses the phrase “subsequent to prior knowledge” when describing whisper stops in his police reports to acknowledge that the tip came from another law enforcement agency without revealing too much in written documents he writes memorializing motorist encounters.

Once they pull over a vehicle deemed suspicious, officers often aggressively question drivers about their travels, their belongings, their jobs, how they know the passengers in the car, and much more, police records and bodyworn camera footage obtained by the AP show. One Texas officer demanded details from a man about where he met his current sexual partner. Often drivers, such as the one working for the South Carolina moving company, were arrested on suspicion of money laundering merely for carrying a few thousand dollars worth of cash, with no apparent connection to illegal activity."
apnews.com - Immigration border patrol surveillance drivers trump takeaways