U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced Tuesday, March 16, the suspension of funding of SBINet, the “virtual fence” along the country’s southwest border, pending the completion of a review of the system ordered in January.
“Effective immediately, the Department of Homeland Security will redeploy $50 million of Recovery Act funding originally allocated for the SBINet Block 1 to other tested, commercially available security technology along the southwest border,” Napolitano said in a statement. The funding will be reallocated to security technologies including: mobile surveillance, ultra-light detection, backscatter units, cameras and laptops for pursuit vehicles, and thermal imaging devices.
A DHS spokesman said the review was being conducted because the secretary felt that a comprehensive analysis of commercially available technology alternatives had not been done. There’s no hard deadline for the review’s completion, but it’s expected as soon as possible.
Implementation of SBInet along the southwestern border has been plagued by problems and delays. In September 2009, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the Border Patrol still must rely on older technology that have performance issues including intermittent signal loss, and new technology deployments have been delayed due to flaws found in testing and potentially negative environmental impacts. The report also predicted that the SBInet project wouldn’t be completed until 2016.
Following the GAO’s report, Napolitano directed the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to review the project. The commissioner’s analysis found “unacceptable delays” Napolitano wrote in a statement e-mailed to the Arizona Daily Star in January. Following the CBP commissioner’s review, she directed a reassessment of the project.
Meanwhile, spending and work on the project has been stopped other than initial deployments in the Tucson and Ajo regions of Arizona, she wrote in the March 16 statement.
Border Security Rests on Improved Immigration System
Experts suggest improved border security will only be possible once the immigration system as a whole is fixed including:
- apprehension and detention of illegal immigrants;
- improved avenues for legal immigration;
- increased coordination among agencies involved in the immigration process; and
- using technology to verify the identities of those entering the country and seeking jobs.
“Until we change other aspects of our immigration policy, we will continue to have pretty unmanageable pressures from illegal immigration that will frustrate effective border enforcement,” said Doris Meissner, former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service commissioner.
Recommendations from a panel of researchers and former immigration officials that was part of the DHS’ University Network Summit on March 11, included the creation of a Cabinet-level agency within the federal government to coordinate immigration programs across the departments of Homeland Security, State, Justice and Labor. The panel also recommended the creation of a commission to study the immigration needs of the United States labor market and make recommendations to Congress.
“What we need to do is have an E-Verify system that works, that is accurate and is trusted by our employment community,” said Neville Cramer, creator and a former director of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program at the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. “We also have to have people who are in the interior of the United States, No. 1 to work with the business community to put it in place and make certain that it’s working. And we must have that system in place and penalize employers who are noncompliant.”
While the I-9 form has been in place since 1986, it hasn’t been effective because of a lack of verification. Verification is also the answer for improving the security of breeder documents — such as birth and baptismal certificates — that can be duplicated on any copying machine. “Look at any Walmart,” Cramer told an audience at the DHS University Network Summit in March. “When you pass through and you use your Visa or your American Express, ladies and gentleman, they don’t care what the document looks like, they don’t care what’s on it. They’re interested in what happens when they verify it. E-Verify is a large answer to our situation.”
Electronically embedding digital fingerprints and biographic information in U.S. passports could help keep bad actors out of the country and improve the flow of passengers through airports. According to Cramer, in 2004, it was decided that electronic passports in the United States wouldn’t contain electronic fingerprints, greatly reducing its effectiveness.
“Using the Advance Passenger Information System, our e-passport could actually inspect individuals before they ever come to the United States. The passport could be read at your check-in counter before the person ever boards the aircraft maybe an hour and a half or two hours,” Cramer said. “The information could be forwarded to their arrival port and the information — their fingerprint, their photographs and their biographic data — could be checked against all the necessary databases before they ever board the aircraft.”
The final key piece is detention of illegal immigrants. “One of the things that has been proven to be significantly important and useful and successful is detention and you never hear anything about it,” Cramer said. “We need to detain individuals who are attempting to come into the United States illegally for 30, 60, 90 days because it does three things: First it prevents them from going back and trying again an hour later; two they don’t come into the country and get jobs; and three they don’t send money back home, which is the original intention for most of them in the first place.”
[Photo courtesy of Senior Airman John Hughel Jr./U.S. Air Force.]
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