DHS’s predictive policing is unconstitutional, un-American and should be stopped

Recent disclosures indicate DHS units have been aggregating Americans' financial and travel records to identify people local law enforcement should investigate, a technique commonly labeled predictive policing. According to reporting cited by Coin Center’s Laz Pieper, these programs rely on large-scale data collection and analysis to generate tips rather than waiting for evidence of a specific crime.

The reporting highlights several concrete encounters where predictive leads appear to have prompted stops. In Montana, Border Patrol’s Predictive Intelligence Targeting Team flagged financial activity that it described in a DHS memo as matching patterns tied to illicit narcotics; that lead preceded a traffic stop of Kyle William Olson, where officers later found marijuana. In Texas, Alek Schott was pulled over and subjected to a vehicle search after federal monitoring of his travel patterns; no contraband was located and Schott has filed suit alleging Fourth Amendment violations.

Pieper contends the domestic use of financial records as investigative triggers is particularly fraught because the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network collects extensive reports under the Bank Secrecy Act, and banks often over-report suspicious activity to avoid regulatory risk. Those aggregated records, he argues, can be repurposed into surveillance tools that treat transaction histories as indicators of belief or association rather than as neutral commerce.

The piece also places U.S. practices in a broader context of financial censorship and account freezes used against protesters in other countries, citing Canada’s 2022 temporary account freezes and China’s bans on protest-related accounts. Pieper points to a 2024 Congressional report that described pressure on banks to look for spending patterns allegedly tied to extremism after the January 6, 2021 attack, using examples such as searches for purchases of 'religious texts.' He warns that relying on financial signals to infer politics or criminality risks turning routine transactions into grounds for state action without the fact-based suspicion required by the Fourth Amendment.