For more than a decade, the same government systems built to screen travelers and flag smugglers were quietly repurposed by the people who ran them — used to chase exes, hit on strangers, and settle personal scores. That's the picture painted by internal case files U.S. Customs and Border Protection released under a Freedom of Information Act request, first reported by Wired.
The records, pulled from CBP's Office of Professional Responsibility and the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General, catalog close to 300 misconduct allegations stretching from 2009 through 2022 — a span long enough to show how far routine access to sensitive law-enforcement data can drift from its intended purpose.
How the Allegations Were Sorted
Of those nearly 300 entries, 138 were handed to CBP managers for review, and 78 were judged serious enough to go to the agency's own criminal investigators. Another 43 were logged for informational purposes only, meaning no formal probe followed, while CBP withheld 21 files entirely, citing exemptions that protect active law-enforcement proceedings — a category that hints some cases may still involve suspected criminal conduct rather than simple bad judgment. Separately, the outlet counted 99 entries tied to unauthorized data breaches or disclosures and 48 built around database queries employees had no legitimate work reason to run.
Pursuing Exes, Crushes, and Neighbors
Much of what surfaces in the files reads less like espionage than fixation. In 2010, a customs officer allegedly pulled a flight attendant's personal information from a government system and used it to make contact — a case that was ultimately referred for internal review. Three years later, in 2013, a different officer is accused of mining the SENTRI trusted-traveler program, which stores prescreened border crossers' personal and trip details, specifically to ask people out.
Other entries describe more mundane, if no less invasive, motives. One officer allegedly ran queries on a neighbor, while a separate 2022 case accuses an employee of pulling an ex-husband's leave schedule — his time-off records, not his general work hours — from a CBP database as part of a harassment campaign. A related 2017 case accuses another officer of misusing government systems to harass an airline employee.
When Insiders Allegedly Helped Criminals
Not every case in the files involves personal drama. One 2016 entry describes a CBP employee suspected of passing database information to a drug-trafficking organization, while a 2021 file accuses a Border Patrol agent of tipping off smugglers about which inspection lane to use at a port of entry.
One file, not previously made public, describes a Homeland Security employee who allegedly used commercially purchased, ad-tech-derived phone location data to track several coworkers' movements. It appears to be the first documented instance of that particular surveillance method — usually associated with tracking the public — being turned on colleagues instead.
Checking Whether Anyone Was Watching
At least six entries involve employees querying their own records. Daniel Altman, who ran CBP's Office of Professional Responsibility until he left the post in 2025, has described self-searches as an early warning sign investigators learned to watch for: in past corruption cases, employees sometimes tested whether their own activity was being monitored before other misconduct escalated. Much of the paper trail is otherwise incomplete — resolution fields in many files were left blank or withheld, which officials attribute partly to inconsistent data entry in the case-tracking system CBP uses to log complaints.
Asked about the findings, a CBP spokesperson told Wired the agency takes misconduct allegations seriously, saying it works to "uphold the rule of law and hold ourselves accountable," and that suspected violations are investigated and can lead to disciplinary action. The agency has said federal privacy statutes limit what it can disclose about individual personnel cases.
A Growing Surveillance Toolkit
The disclosures arrive as CBP's data reach keeps expanding well beyond the systems named in the files. The agency and ICE also draw on Palantir's case-management platforms and Mobile Fortify, a facial-recognition app that went live in May 2025, plus commercially purchased phone-location data — a category of tool a 2023 DHS inspector-general review found CBP, ICE, and the Secret Service had used without fully complying with the department's own privacy rules. Immigration attorney Laura Rivera of Just Futures Law described the pattern as structural rather than isolated, arguing that accountability at the agency has consistently lagged behind the scope of the data it collects.
A separate Wired analysis found that ICE and CBP have collectively spent roughly $515 million on products from major tech vendors, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Palantir, in recent years.
What's Still Unknown
Whether any of the employees named in the files faced lasting consequences remains, in most cases, undocumented. What the records do establish is a pattern spanning more than a decade in which tools built to vet travelers and catch criminals were, case after case, redirected toward personal ends.
