[libstripper]

Update from The Hill article posted just before I posted this one:

"The [US] official told CNN that the unnamed woman, who was carrying a firearm at the time of her arrest, was detained by authorities at a U.S.-Canada border while attempting to enter the U.S."

Looks like US officials made the bust and her possessing the gun might have been what triggered it.

[Hootowl99]

If the woman was driving her own car, there’s a pretty good chance that her auto license plate number is what triggered the search, which in turn discovered the gun. It sounds like the feds with CA assistance had already traced the letter to the CA province and town. A license plate scan could trigger a red flag on the plate. A passport could also trigger a search simply from the address info.

I was crossing from the US into CA several years ago to do some work so had to get a work permit kind of visa at the border. Very quickly, the CA customs had background info on me. It took awhile for them to generate the visa hard copy that was attached into my passport but they rapidly acquired the info they needed to verify that my bonafides were satisfactory. I’m pretty sure that US and CA authorities are tied together pretty tightly for reciprocal access to each other’s databases at least up to a certain level.