The U.S. Border Patrol is secretly monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a program to identify and detain individuals who have “suspicious” travel patterns, the Associated Press claims. According to the outlet, the “predictive intelligence program” uses cameras to scan and record vehicle license plate information and flag those deemed suspicious. Federal agents can potentially notify local law enforcement, the outlet said. The outlet shared this extensive video report: 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. pic.twitter.com/EeG1O7e5W6 — The Associated Press (@AP) November 21, 2025 More from the Associated Press: 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. This investigation, the first to reveal details of how the program works on America’s roads, is based on interviews with eight former government officials with direct knowledge of the program who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media, as well as dozens of federal, state and local officials, attorneys and privacy experts. The AP also reviewed thousands of pages of court and government documents, state grant and law enforcement data, and arrest reports. NewsNation provided additional coverage: The Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers and detaining people through a surveillance program that flags “suspicious” travel patterns, an Associated Press investigation found. More: https://t.co/QhXGaHTMtP pic.twitter.com/9fOlhTPu9T — NewsNation (@NewsNation) November 21, 2025 CBS News shared additional info: While collecting license plates from cars on public roads has generally been upheld by courts, some legal scholars see the growth of large digital surveillance networks such as the Border Patrol’s as raising constitutional questions. 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, said Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University. Nicole Ozer, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy at UC Law San Francisco, expressed alarm when told of AP’s findings. “They are collecting mass amounts of information about who people are, where they go, what they do, and who they know,” she said. “These surveillance systems do not make communities safer.”