It was a sunny mid-March morning in 2022 when Alek Schott headed home to Houston from Carrizo Springs, near the Mexico border. He had just finished a training for his pipeline supply company and dropped a carpool colleague off at the local Holiday Inn where she’d stayed the previous night. He turned on his dash camera and started driving.
About an hour into the trip, a Bexar County sheriff’s deputy parked on the east side of Interstate 35 flipped on his lights and followed Schott’s truck to the shoulder. He’d seen the pickup drift over the yellow line, he explained, a violation of state traffic laws.
What Schott, who has no criminal history, couldn’t have known is that he had been tagged as a potential lawbreaker by a vast and mysterious surveillance system along the South Texas region’s roadways. A network of cameras scanning license plates of passing vehicles had crunched the data in real time and determined that the details of his trip — a quick excursion to the border with a woman dropped off at a hotel — suggested smuggling behavior…