Orwell would be proud:

Border Patrol Flags, Detains US Motorists for 'Suspicious' Travel Patterns

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/border-patrol-u-s-motorists-license-plate/2025/11/20/id/1235316/

Thursday, 20 November 2025 08:01 AM EST

(Story way to long to post here)

The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a program that has not been widely publicized 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. Drivers may find themselves pulled over and then questioned and searched, with no awareness that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement's radar.

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 drivers' daily travel patterns 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 gradual 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 large-scale surveillance network with a particularly American focus: cars.