At Rancho Feliz, we have spent nearly four decades building trust across the Arizona-Mexico border. We build homes in Agua Prieta. We fund scholarships. We send thousands of volunteers — most of them young people — across the line to serve families living in poverty, and we watch that service change them on both sides. That work is possible because the communities we touch believe we are there to help, not to surveil. That trust is not abstract. It is the foundation every single program we run is built on.

Which is why what Congress is about to do — or fail to do — by June 12 matters deeply to us and should matter to all Arizonans.

Our congressional leaders are stalled on how to  reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). An increasingly important angle of this debate is a loophole that allows federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to purchase Americans’ private cell phone location data from commercial data brokers — with no warrant, no judge and no oversight. Normally, accessing that kind of information requires a court order. This loophole lets the government write a check instead. Congress has not kept up with technological progress and it has led to rampant abuse.

Agencies across the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and Treasury have already made these purchases. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent in the last year alone by DHS on data brokers. That data is incredibly detailed — mapping where you go — your doctor, your church, your children’s school, your family members’ homes and so much more. For the cross-border families and border-region communities that Rancho Feliz serves, that kind of surveillance is not an abstraction. It is the difference between someone showing up for a medical appointment or staying home. Between a family attending a community meeting or going quiet. Fear is not irrational when the government has already demonstrated it will use every tool available to watch us and racial profiling and mass raids upend lives.

The stakes are higher now than they have ever been. Stephen Miller and the Trump Administration are pushing hard for a clean reauthorization — meaning no reforms and no restrictions. And artificial intelligence is making this exponentially more dangerous: location data purchased today can be fed into AI-driven systems capable of building detailed surveillance profiles of entire communities at a speed and scale that has no historical precedent. All of it without a single warrant.

According to a 2023 YouGov poll, 80% of Americans believe the government should be required to obtain a warrant before purchasing location data from brokers. This is not a partisan position. The federal government should follow the Fourth Amendment. More than 130 civil society organizations — including the ACLU, UnidosUS, Amnesty International USA, and the Project On Government Oversight — have taken the same stand. To date, Congress has rejected legislation that fails to reform this system of unaccountable surveillance. There is finally recognition that the time for change is now. The path forward is clear: close the data broker loophole. The solutions put forward in the bipartisan Government Surveillance Reform Act or the bipartisan SAFE Act would allow Section 702 to be reauthorized while closing this loophole for good.

Arizona’s congressional leaders — led by Senators Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly — have a choice to make before the June 12 deadline. They can accept legislation that fails to solve this problem and effectively writes warrantless data purchasing permanently into federal law — or they can demand that any extension of FISA close the loophole first. The communities across Arizona are watching. At Rancho Feliz, we don’t build walls. We build dignity. We are asking our senators to do the same.

Donna Valdés is CEO of Rancho Feliz Charitable Foundation, a Phoenix-based nonprofit.