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Just a guess, but maybe the CBP takes pictures of the license plate at land border crossings?

CBP does more than that.

They have a joint venture with DEA to have fairly comprehensive coverage of interstates. Also, private companies offer LPR services and sharing, not sure if this company did or if that database was breached.

if not pictures, i would say license plate numbers are at least recorded digitally inside of their report.

If they took a decent picture, then they could identify something that looks like the license plate and then use OCR to compute the number and store that.

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