I Told You So

Big Brother is watching you! Big Brother in this case is the Custom Border Patrol and all of those traffic camera, it turns out that the pictures they take are find their way into the CBP & ICE webs.

Border Patrol is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with ‘suspicious’ travel patterns

AP News

By  BYRON TAU and GARANCE BURKE

November 20, 2025

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.

The predictive intelligence program has resulted in people being stopped, searched and in some cases arrested. A network of cameras scans and records vehicle license plate information, and an algorithm flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on where they came from, where they were going and which route they took. Federal agents in turn may then flag local law enforcement.

Here is the Big Brother part...

Once limited to policing the nation’s boundaries, the Border Patrol has built a surveillance system stretching into the country’s interior that can monitor ordinary Americans’ daily actions and connections for anomalies instead of simply targeting wanted suspects. Started about a decade ago to fight illegal border-related activities and the trafficking of both drugs and people, it has expanded over the past five years.

The Border Patrol has recently grown even more powerful through collaborations with other agencies, drawing information from license plate readers nationwide run by the Drug Enforcement Administration, private companies and, increasingly, local law enforcement programs funded through federal grants. Texas law enforcement agencies have asked Border Patrol to use facial recognition to identify drivers, documents show.

This active role beyond the borders is part of the quiet transformation of its parent agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, into something more akin to a domestic intelligence operation. Under the Trump administration’s heightened immigration enforcement efforts, CBP is now poised to get more than $2.7 billion to build out border surveillance systems such as the license plate reader program by layering in artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

The result is a mass surveillance network with a particularly American focus: cars.

They knew that the public would not like the mass surveillance network so they kept it a secret! They never release that fact the arrest data came from the network! People think they are safe because the camera data is limited in who can see and use the data. Or so they think!

The Border Patrol has for years hidden details of its license plate reader program, trying to keep any mention of the program out of court documents and police reports, former officials say, even going so far as to propose dropping charges rather than risk revealing any details about the placement and use of their covert license plate readers. Readers are often disguised along highways in traffic safety equipment like drums and barrels.

Hey! Wait a second. How did they do that without the cooperation of the states?

Well you see it works this way...

• The local police department puts up Flock Safety or Vigilant Solutions to monitor local roads
• The photo are uploaded to the vendor's national cloud database.
• State laws limits who and how the traffic information can be used.
• CBP or ICE pays the Commercial Vendor for subscription access to their entire national database so they can paw through all the data.

But, but, what about state laws? The Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution generally holds that federal laws and federal agency actions, when acting within their scope of authority (like border security and immigration enforcement), take precedence over conflicting state and local laws. The vendor deletes the data in 90 days but the feds have a copy of it and they can keep forever and forever, as long as they want! The federal agency can then query the entire database, including the data that was collected in the restrictive state, without ever interacting directly with the local police agency.

Suppose there is an ALPR camera in front of a trans clinic where local laws prohibit using the photos for political or non-local purposes. Those photos find their way into CBP's hands via the vendor. Now, if the State of Texas (with its laws against gender-affirming care) were to ask the commercial vendor for a list of all Texas-plated cars at that clinic, the vendor might legally decline or claim a privacy policy. But the Federal Agency (CBP or ICE) is a different story entirely.

Do you think they will use this data to track people leaving the state for abortions? For obtaining birth control pills? Our hormones? Trump... is Big Brother! 1984 came forty years late.