Homeland Security fiddles at airports while illegals stream over Mexican border

I just sat through a surreal Committee on Homeland Security hearing where the minutia of biometric tracking of legal immigrants was discussed and not a peep was uttered about our totally unsecure border with Mexico and other land-border-crossing controls were dismissed as “difficult.”

The money and time that we as a nation are spending on fingerprinting and tracking visitors who enter our country legally, while ignoring a small problem of tens-of-thousands or perhaps hundreds-of-thousands of undocumented “visitors” waking across the border is something from Alice in Wonderland.

OK. Just like a good science fiction movie or spy thriller, I have to suspend belief a bit to focus on this committee hearing. Suffice it to say, when one ignores the Mexican border and undocumented visitors, our country’s security organizations are impressive and getting more impressive.

The U.S. has two different border control systems — one for legal visitors, tourists, workers and students and a second for illegal and undocumented visitors. The first is impressive, well funded, growing and relatively effective. The second is an embarrassment. If the U.S. was a house, one might say that our front door is locked tightly and well secured, but the back door is open.

Any traveler should know that their movements and specifics are available to our security services. We have a growing body of investigators and agencies that are collecting more and more information about us and legal foreign visitors to keep us safe and hold down numbers of legal visitors.

Here is the chilling (or comforting, depending on your point of view) testimony from Rand Beer, the Under Secretary, National Protection and Programs Directorate, Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

We have made significant improvements in the last five years:
• We have worked to unify immigration and border management systems in order to implement a robust, effective, timely and efficient capability to access and use biometrics-based information on criminals, immigration violators, and known or suspected terrorists.
• ICE identifies visitors who overstay their authorized terms of admission through an average of more than 300 credible leads that US-VISIT provides each week. Through ICE’s Secure Communities program, we are also helping to identify immigration
violators that state and local law enforcement officers arrest.
• Through the successful implementation of large scale biometric screening by US-VISIT we have provided support and leadership to biometric border management programs undertaken in the United Kingdom and Japan, and continue to support and encourage programs in various stages of application in the European Union, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Argentina, Peru, and other countries.
• We have put better capabilities in place for more efficient identification of fraudulent documents. We cooperated closely with DOS when it introduced an electronic passport, and we made every effort to ensure compliance with new passport standards by Visa Waiver Program countries. We have also worked together with State to implement the U.S. passport card, which provides U.S. citizens a secure, limited-use travel document in a more convenient format.
• We have implemented the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, whereby U.S. and Canadian travelers are required to present more secure travel documents that denote identity and citizenship when seeking to enter our country, helping officers focus on threats while making legitimate travel more efficient.

Back to the biometrics. We are subjecting all foreign visitors to the United States to the same procedures faced by criminals under arrest. Every visitor to the United States now has all ten fingers fingerprinted.

DHS’ transition from collecting two to collecting 10 digital fingerprints at U.S. ports of entry from visitors to the United States is nearly complete. DHS deployed new 10-fingerprint scanners at ports of entry in 2008, and today the new 10-fingerprint scanning devices are in place at all major ports of entry, where international visitors can expect to use the upgraded technology when they enter the United States.

The use of 10-fingerprint readers improves the accuracy of identification; improves interoperability with the FBI, DOS, and local and tribal governments; and reduces the number of travelers referred to CBP secondary inspection. DHS is now able to conduct full searches against the FBI Unsolved Latent File, which allows DHS to match against prints lifted from crime scenes and those collected on battlefields and in safe houses overseas.

That is the present the situation for incoming visitors. Now, DHS is proposing the same 10-finger-fingerprinting for visitors as they depart the U.S. Testing for this system is already underway in Detroit where Border Patrol officers are collecting fingerprints at the boarding gates and in Atlanta where fingerprints are being collected at the TSA screening sites.

Of course, just as there is one tightly controlled and very expensive system for legal visitors and a non-existent version for illegals, this 10-finger-fingerprinting system is only foisted upon those who decide to arrive and depart by air. These same controls are not enforced at our land border ports of entry meaning that 300 million entries and departures are undocumented.

The man in charge of this Orwellian fingerprinting system focused only at airports, acknowledges, when discussing non-airline arrivals and departures, that, “Due to variations in infrastructure, environment, and traffic volume from port to port, a one-size-fits-all solution will be difficult.”

For the record, I am not a terrorist. Maybe, they don’t think the same way that I do. However, after hearing this testimony, I would simply fly into Mexico or Canada and then drive into the country or better yet take a bus to get into Fortress U.S. Or, maybe, I’d choose to stroll across the Texas/Mexico border.

And, by the way, anyone planning to travel abroad, should get ready for similar treatment from other countries. Fingerprints and iris scans are in our future.

More astonishing excerpts from the Homeland Security hearings will be revealed next week.