404 Media Names PITT: Border Patrol Teams Scoring Americans' Finances, Routing Stops Through State Police

404 Media reported on September 8, 2026 the existence of Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams — PITT — inside U.S. Border Patrol, with desks documented in the Spokane Sector on the Canadian line and the Laredo Sector on the Mexican line. The teams analyze Americans’ financial records and travel patterns, build targeting packages on people not suspected of any specific crime, and pass them to state and local police, who make the actual traffic stop.

The mechanism is visible in the case that surfaced the program. A Border Patrol analyst named Matthew Phelps flagged Kyle Olson for “financial activity patterns commonly associated with illicit narcotics activity.” That analysis went to the Montana Highway Patrol, which pulled Olson over — citing an obstructed license plate.

The stated reason for the stop and the actual reason for the stop are different facts, and only one of them appears in the record. Jake Laperruque put the objection precisely: “genuine probable cause cannot be synthetically generated,” describing the arrangement as parallel construction — a federal analysis supplying the target, a state pretext supplying the legal basis, and no document connecting them.

What makes this structural rather than anecdotal is the division of labor. The federal unit does not make the stop, so it never has to satisfy a probable-cause standard; the state trooper who does make the stop has an independent, facially valid reason and need not know what generated the lead. Neither party performs the constitutional test, and the test is not skipped so much as routed around. It is the same shape this timeline has tracked in procurement — a function distributed across parties until no single one of them is the accountable actor.

CBP declined substantive answers. A spokesperson told 404 Media that Border Patrol “uses intelligence-informed analysis and planning to support national security operations,” and would not say what financial activity triggers scrutiny or whether any warrant procedure applies.

The financial-data question is the one to watch. This timeline already documents warrantless purchase of commercially available location data by FBI and ICE; PITT extends the same logic to spending patterns, and the entity acting on the score is a highway patrol officer at a car window.