On a broken two-lane road on the eastern edge of San Diego County, James Cordero parked his Jeep on the shoulder after seeing something. It looked like an abandoned trailer. Inside, he discovered a hidden camera feeding a vast surveillance network that recorded the license plate of every driver passing through the remote backcountry between San Diego and the Arizona state line.
Cordero, 44, found dozens of these cameras hidden in trailers and construction barrels on border roads around San Diego and Imperial counties: One on Old Highway 80 near Jacumba Hot Springs; Another is outside the Golden Acorn Casino in Campo; another route takes Interstate 8 to In-Ko-Pah Canyon.
They started popping up after California gave the Border Patrol and other federal agencies permission to install license plate readers on state highways in the final months of the Biden administration. As many as 40 people are now entering information into a Trump administration database as Democratic-led states rage against the federal government’s mass deportation plans.
The cameras have raised concerns among privacy experts, civil liberties advocates and humanitarian aid workers, who say California should not be supporting a surveillance and data collection program they see as unwarranted government intrusion into the lives of Americans who have committed no crimes. Additionally, they said the plan conflicts with state law.
Supporters say the devices could allow law enforcement to quickly identify and locate people they suspect of committing serious crimes. They also believe the cameras could help agencies detect patterns of drug and human trafficking and could be used to help find missing people, such as children or other vulnerable people.
“If you’re not doing anything illegal, why should you worry?” said Allen Stanks, 70, a longtime Jacumba resident.
“Everybody talks about privacy, okay. Don’t put everything on Facebook. ‘Here are pictures of my food.'” Who cares? “Stanks said.
However, some locals suspect the cameras are behind some of the unusual encounters they have had in recent months with officials from the Border Patrol and its parent agency, Customs and Border Protection. In one case, agents questioned the grandmother of a legal permanent resident about why she went to a casino, according to her grandson.
James Cordero, a volunteer with the nonprofit Border Angels, places water bottles in a remote area near the end of the U.S.-Mexico border fence on December 29, 2018. (Apu Gomez/AFP via Getty Images)
Cordero has different concerns. On his days off, he led volunteers into remote areas of the county to leave water, food, and clothing for migrant workers. He feared his colleagues might be detained by agents.
“I’m not too worried about myself, but I’m worried about a lot of the volunteers that are coming out,” Cordero said. “I don’t want them to have to deal with any bullshit of being followed or being stopped and questioned.”
He had good reason to be nervous. During the first Trump administration, federal officials prosecuted volunteers from the humanitarian group Death No More for leaving water and supplies for migrants in the Arizona desert. The volunteers faced charges including “abandoned property” and harboring a felony, although some of their convictions were later overturned.
The Border Patrol provides little information on its website about the use of license plate readers. In 2020, the Department of Homeland Security released a report that generally described the technology but did not specify where it would be used. Kalmats reached out to Border Patrol and Homeland Security officials for comment but did not receive a response.
“There’s no transparency, that’s the worst part,” Cordero said.
The DHS report said some readers were capturing license plate numbers, the make and model of the vehicle, the state in which the vehicle was registered, the camera owner and type, the GPS coordinates of where the image was taken, and the date and time of capture.
“The technology can also capture the environment surrounding the vehicle (within the image), which may include the driver and passengers,” the report states. It also says the FBI has access to license plate readers operated by commercial vendors.
Mapping hidden cameras
Earlier this month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a coalition of 30 organizations sent a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom and the California Department of Transportation urging them to revoke state licenses and remove covert readers operated along California border highways by federal agencies like Customs and Border Protection and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The San Francisco-based privacy and civil rights advocacy group, also known as EFF, mapped more than 40 hidden license plate readers in Southern California, mostly along border highways. It claims the devices circumvent a 2016 state law that details how law enforcement agencies can use automated license plate readers, commonly known as ALPRs.
“By allowing the Border Patrol and the Drug Enforcement Administration to install license plate readers along the border, they are essentially bypassing protections [California law]”,” said Dave Maass, EFF’s director of investigations. “This is a backdoor.” “
Maas said he believed Cordero’s concerns about agencies monitoring humanitarian volunteers may be valid.
“They claim they may be looking for smugglers, or they may be looking for cartel members, but that’s not what they’re collecting data on,” Maas said. “[The program] Data is mainly collected about the people living in the area.
Maas said it was impossible to determine which agency installed each camera, but his organization checked with all other agencies in the area, such as the San Diego and Empire Sheriff’s Departments, the California Highway Patrol and Cal Fire, among others.
Maas said the models of cameras currently installed on national highways in the border area are the same models that the Border Patrol purchased in large quantities. Maass said records obtained by EFF from Caltrans since 2016 appear to show that the Drug Enforcement Administration and Border Patrol requested permission to install the same equipment in other areas of San Diego County.
Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for comment. The governor’s office had no comment. The Drug Enforcement Administration also did not respond to a request for comment.
Caltrans approves ALPR request
During the day, Cordero works in water damage restoration, staffing residents who call police after flooding and burst pipes, making it easy for him to respond to emergencies.
“People are literally dying here,” Cordero said of the volunteer work he does through the nonprofit Al Otro Lado, a legal services organization that also provides humanitarian support to refugees, immigrants and deportees on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. “All we’re doing is preventing people from dying.”
In response to questions from CalMatters, a Caltrans spokesperson provided a written statement saying the state agency has approved eight license plate reader permits from federal agencies, including Customs and Border Protection and the Drug Enforcement Administration, to be stationed on state highway rights-of-way.
“Caltrans does not operate, manage or determine the specific uses of technology or equipment installed by permit holders, nor does Caltrans have access to any data collected,” the statement reads in part.
Caltrans said federal immigration agencies have not applied for permits for the cameras since June 2024. They did not say how long the license would be valid. Between 2015 and 2024, their records show that Customs and Border Protection and the Drug Enforcement Administration requested 14 license applications for “law enforcement surveillance equipment.” Of the 14 projects, eight were approved, four were canceled by the applicants and two did not receive state rights of way, the agency said.
In California, license plates are tracked not only by the federal government and law enforcement, but also by schools and businesses, including some Home Depots and shopping malls. While schools and businesses may not agree to pass this information on to the federal government, local police who have access to the cameras may.
California law prohibits state and local agencies from sharing license plate data with out-of-state entities, including federal agencies involved in immigration enforcement. A June 2025 CalMatters investigation revealed that Southern California law enforcement agencies, including the Sheriff’s Departments in San Diego and Orange counties, violated state law by sharing automated license plate reader data with federal agencies.
Last fall, Newsom vetoed a bill that would have strengthened California’s license plate reader laws. Two days later, Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta has filed a lawsuit against the city of El Cajon over repeated violations of a ban on license plate sharing. Since 2024, the Attorney General’s Office has sent letters to 18 law enforcement agencies, including the Imperial County Sheriff’s Office, San Diego Police Department and El Centro Police Department.
Local agencies continue to share license plate data with federal immigration authorities, not just at the border. The San Pablo Police Department in Northern California, one of the law enforcement agencies that received a letter from the attorney general’s office, also shared license plate data with the Border Patrol last month, according to records obtained by Mike Katz-Lacabe, director of privacy research in Oakland. Some cameras are easy to spot, but Katz-Lakabe said local police have been hiding cameras that scan license plates for more than a decade, sometimes behind the grilles of police cars, inside speed-limited trailers or inside fake cactus.
“That’s been the approach for years,” he said.
On a recent Saturday, Cordero was dressed in attire appropriate to the remote frontier — flannel, hiking boots, a San Diego Padres hat pulled low to protect him from the sun. On this particular weekend, supplies at one of the drop sites had been used, suggesting people may be traveling through the area.
Cordero is good at finding things here. In the remote Ocotillo Depression, where bushes claw at people’s shins, he recently discovered what he believes are the remains of human fingers.
A year ago, Cordero discovered a list of phone contacts next to human remains. He and his wife, Jacqueline Arellano, were able to use a phone list to notify the man’s family in Arizona where their missing loved one fell.
That’s why, a few months ago, when he first saw an abandoned trailer on the side of the road on old Highway 80, he had to stop and take a closer look.
“It took me walking by a few times before I realized what it was,” Cordero said.
Pull grandma over
An Associated Press investigation published in November revealed that the Border Patrol had hidden license plate readers among ordinary traffic security equipment. Data collected by the agency’s license plate readers is fed into a predictive intelligence program that monitors millions of U.S. drivers across the country to identify and detain those traveling in ways that algorithms deem suspicious, according to an AP investigation.
Customs and Border Protection apparently thought his grandmother was driving suspiciously because they asked her about the time she spent at local casinos in the area, said Sergio Ojeda, a community organizer with the mutual aid group Imperial Valley Equity and Justice.
“She was angry about it,” Ojeda said. His grandmother, a legal resident of the Imperial Valley, was in transit when agents asked her about her trip to the casino.
“She asked them, ‘What’s wrong with this? Shouldn’t I be doing this? Or why are you asking me this?’ And they said, ‘Oh, no, this looks suspicious,'” Ojeda recalled.
Ojeda said he’s equally concerned and doesn’t like the feeling of being watched just because he lives near the border. “That’s how I feel every day,” he said. “While driving around, I joked with my colleagues: ‘What chapter of 1984 is this?'”
Wendy Fry and Kari Johnson write for CalMatters
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
