Stop Border Patrol’s Secret Domestic Surveillance Program

I urge you to launch immediate public hearings and an independent investigation into Border Patrol’s reported domestic predictive-policing program, require DHS and CBP to disclose its legal authority and data sources, and prohibit surveillance-driven traffic stops without individualized reasonable suspicion tied to a specific crime. Reports indicate that U.S. Border Patrol is using “predictive intelligence” systems to analyze Americans’ financial activity, travel patterns, license-plate data, and other personal information, then sharing intelligence with local police to stop people who are not suspected of a specific crime. This is not immigration enforcement. Border Patrol exists to enforce laws at the border, not to run a secret domestic surveillance and predictive-policing system against Americans traveling inside the United States. What legitimate border-enforcement purpose is served by monitoring someone’s financial metadata and arranging a traffic stop far from a border? This reported program appears to violate the Constitution at its core. The Fourth Amendment protects Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures. The government cannot evade that protection by secretly profiling people through opaque databases or algorithms, then using a minor traffic pretext to stop, interrogate, or search them. It also threatens Fifth Amendment due process, First Amendment rights of association and expression, equal protection, and basic human rights to privacy, liberty, dignity, and freedom from arbitrary government interference. No one should be secretly labeled suspicious because an algorithm decides their purchases, movements, or relationships are an “anomaly.” A free society cannot tolerate federal agencies building hidden dossiers on people who are not under investigation, sharing those judgments with local police, and concealing the real basis for a stop. That is an architecture for suspicionless surveillance that erodes civil rights, freedom, democratic accountability, and public trust. Americans do not lose their constitutional rights because they drive, spend money, or cross a state line. Please act now.