What's Actually in Your File (And How to Read It)

I submitted my first FOIA request to U.S. Customs and Border Protection expecting a few pages of entry and exit records. What came back was more than fifty pages — including physical descriptions written by border officers, notes from secondary screenings I'd half-forgotten, and remarks I didn't know existed about the questions I'd been asked.

The government has a better memory of my border crossings than I do.

You can request your own file. The process is free, it's legal, and it's more revealing than most people expect. This article is the toolkit — how to see what's in the file, and how to track what new surveillance infrastructure is being built before it gets to you.

The FOIA Universe

The Freedom of Information Act gives U.S. citizens and permanent residents the right to request records held by federal agencies. For travelers, that means you can request your own government travel file. Not a summary, not a form letter — your actual records.

The catch is that no single agency holds everything. Different agencies maintain different records, each requires a separate request, and each has its own backlog. Here's the landscape:

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)

CBP holds the most comprehensive travel file. Their records go back to 1982, and what you can request includes: border apprehension and encounter records, entry and exit records, I-94 records, and Passenger Name Record data.

To submit, you go through CBP's SecureRelease portal (cbp.gov/travel/foia). It's free. You'll need to provide your full name, address, date of birth, and a signed Certification of Identity — a standard form that's part of the submission.

What you'll likely receive: a detailed log of every time you've entered or exited the United States, sometimes going back decades. People have found their files contain physical descriptions written by border officers, notes from secondary screenings they'd half-forgotten, and records of questions asked during inspections. You may discover that the government has remembered things about your border interactions that you've long since forgotten.

The limitation: FOIA will show you what's in the file, but it won't explain why you were delayed or denied entry. For that, the mechanism is the DHS Traveler Redress Inquiry Program (DHS TRIP), which I covered in the previous article. FOIA and DHS TRIP are different tools, and you may need both.

Expect the process to take months. CBP has a significant backlog, and complex requests take longer than simple ones. Submit and be patient.

TSA

TSA maintains Secure Flight records and screening data separately from CBP. These records require a separate request, submitted through TSA's FOIA portal at tsa.gov/foia. TSA records are generally less voluminous than CBP records, but if you've had repeated SSSS experiences, the records may shed some light on what's driving them.

State Department

The State Department holds your passport records, visa application records, and overseas citizen services history. If you've ever had a visa denied or a passport application flagged, those records exist at State. Submit through foia.state.gov.

FBI National Crime Information Center

The FBI's records are the most complex to access and involve a distinct process called an Identity History Summary check. If you have criminal records in the NCIC, or if you've been incorrectly entered into criminal databases, this is where that information lives. The process runs through the FBI's CJIS division and requires fingerprinting.

Together, these four agencies paint a reasonably complete picture of what the U.S. government knows about your movements and your status across multiple systems. Nobody in government is looking at all of it simultaneously in normal circumstances — but the records exist, and they're yours to request.

What People Actually Find

"Travel records" sounds innocuous. The reality is more specific than that.

People who have submitted CBP FOIA requests have received files containing: physical descriptions written by CBP officers (height, hair color, apparent age), notes from secondary inspection conversations, records of where they were coming from and what they said about their plans, and sometimes notes that are difficult to interpret without context — references to checks run, databases queried, outcomes noted.

If you've ever been in secondary inspection and wondered what the officer was typing while you sat across the table from them, those notes are likely in your file.

The data asymmetry problem is worth understanding: no single official sees your complete file. The check-in agent sees the PNR. The CBP officer at the primary booth sees the ATS risk score and your travel history. The secondary inspection officer may add notes. The analyst reviewing your FOIA response sees the aggregate of all of it. You're the only person who has a reason to assemble the complete picture — and FOIA is the tool to do it.

The Palantir Layer

There's a piece of this infrastructure that deserves its own explanation, because it fundamentally changes the nature of what "data silos" means in the government context.

Palantir Technologies is a data analytics company most associated with intelligence community work. It has significant contracts across DHS, CBP, and other agencies involved in border security and travel data. What Palantir actually does is data integration: it connects otherwise separate databases and makes them queryable as a unified whole.

Criminal records. Immigration history. Travel patterns. Financial transaction data. Watchlist records. Each of these lives in separate systems maintained by separate agencies. Palantir-type integration means that for authorized analysts, those walls between silos are considerably more porous than the public understands. It doesn't mean every CBP officer at a primary booth has a unified profile in front of them. It means that at higher analytical levels of the border security apparatus, the data is increasingly being treated as a connected whole rather than isolated records.

This matters for two reasons. First, it means the "separate agencies hold separate records" framing understates the degree of integration already happening. Second, it means the practical privacy protection that once came from data fragmentation — the fact that no one agency connected all the dots — is gradually eroding.

The Procurement Trail: How to Track What's Coming

Here's the angle that I think separates genuinely informed travelers from everyone else: if you want to know what the government is planning to do with your travel data next, read what they're buying.

Under federal procurement law, any government contract solicitation above $25,000 must be publicly posted on SAM.gov — the System for Award Management, which is the federal government's central contracting database. These solicitations include detailed statements of work describing precisely what capabilities the agency wants to build. They're written for contractors who need to understand the technical scope, not for the public, which means they're often remarkably candid.

In April 2023, DHS released a solicitation focused on developing automated anomaly detection algorithms for border inspection. The contract was awarded to BigBear.ai, whose subsidiary Pangiam developed the technology. That's a concrete, documented expansion of AI-driven passenger screening — and it was sitting in publicly available procurement records.

CBP now openly documents its AI use cases for border management: tools that assess passport validity, assign risk scores to individual travelers, and use computer vision to identify anomalies at ports of entry. CBP's total spending reached $12.1 billion in fiscal year 2024.

How to use this: go to sam.gov. Search for "CBP passenger" or "DHS traveler data." Read the statements of work in recent solicitations. They're dry — procurement documents always are — but they describe in operational detail what screening capabilities are being built, what data sources are being integrated, and what analytical outcomes are being sought.

The ACLU and EFF both use procurement records as transparency tools, monitoring contract solicitations to track the expansion of surveillance infrastructure before it's deployed. There's no reason individual travelers can't do the same. The information is public. It just requires knowing where to look and being willing to read something that's written for government contracting officers rather than for a general audience.

Start Here

Submit a FOIA request to CBP through SecureRelease. Do it now, before you've forgotten what you said during that secondary inspection a few years ago. CBP almost certainly hasn't.

If you've had repeated SSSS issues or border delays, file a DHS TRIP complaint in parallel. FOIA shows you the file. DHS TRIP may help you correct it.

If you want to track what's coming next, spend an hour on SAM.gov reading recent DHS and CBP solicitations. The information is public. Most people just don't know to look.

None of this stops the surveillance. But there's a meaningful difference between being observed and knowing you're being observed — and knowing what they see.

Up next: why your phone may be your biggest vulnerability at the border.