GovernmentExecutive.com

Homeland Security officials told lawmakers on Wednesday that the nation's border guards have problems identifying counterfeit birth certificates and driver's licenses, and the vulnerability will remain until the government implements new security requirements.

Jayson Ahern, assistant commissioner for field operations at the Customs and Border Protection division, told the Senate Finance Committee during a hearing that implementing stricter requirements for foreign visitors must not be delayed.

Some lawmakers want to delay the Western Hemisphere travel initiative, which will require travelers to and from the Americas, Bermuda and the Caribbean to first establish their identities with passports or other accepted documents. The requirement takes effect for all air and sea travelers on Jan. 1 and all land travelers on Jan. 1, 2008.

Industry and travel groups have lobbied to push back the deadlines, saying they will be too costly to implement and create a bureaucratic logjam at the borders.

Wednesday's hearing came after a Government Accountability Office investigation that found inspectors are still able to get past border guards using fictitious driver's licenses and "other bogus documentation." Investigators defeated the nation's border security through nine land ports along both the northern and southern borders and at an airport from Jamaica, said Gregory Kutz, GAO's managing director on forensic audits and special investigations.

Kutz told the committee that the ability of border agents to detect fraudulent travel documents has not improved since a May 2003 hearing on the subject. In written testimony to the committee, he said "our periodic tests since 2002 clearly show that CBP officers are unable to effectively identify counterfeit driver's licenses, birth certificates and other documents. This vulnerability potentially allows terrorists or others involved in criminal activity to pass freely into the United States from Canada or Mexico."

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, expressed amazement that the border vulnerability has persisted. "Frankly, it's hard to believe that there has been so little progress in plugging this gaping security hole," he said. "Until someone does something to address this problem, criminals and terrorists will know that our front door is wide open."

Ahern said CBP is giving border guards more equipment and training to help read documents. But he said guards are flooded with documents. More than 870,000 people using 8,000 different documents try to enter the country each day through land borders.

Ahern said the solution is for the government to standardize travel documents and require them to have biometric identifiers, such as digital photographs, and be machine readable, which helps ensure their authenticity. The Western Hemisphere travel initiative would do just that.

Ahern said CBP has sent the White House Office of Management and Budget a notice of proposed rulemaking for the initiative's first deadline. The rulemaking will define what documents will work. Ahern did not say when the rulemaking will be made public.

COMMENTS

• I agree with the poster who blamed this mess on the "One Face at the Border" concept, which merged Customs, Immigration and Agriculture inspectors, who had very different and complicated jobs, into one workforce, now called Customs and Border Protection (CBP). All this resulted in was a system whose officers are "jacks of all trades, and masters of none." Each legacy job required specialized training and experience. To have one officer try and do the work of three is foolish at best and criminally negligent at worst. Would you want your cardiologist performing neurosurgery, or perhaps trying his hand at obstetrics, because after all, isn't he a doctor? The same comparison applies to one officer trying to be proficient in all the various facets of Customs, Immigration and Agriculture law. While we're at it, we can say the same about ICE, in which Customs and Immigration agents, whose jobs had absolutely nothing in common, were forced together in another ridiculous merger that cost taxpayers billions of dollars, but did little in the way of making this nation safer. On top of that lunacy, the FPS, which guards federal buildings, was also thrown into ICE, for no apparent good reason! The inmates are indeed running the asylum. What a disgrace! GovExec.com reader Posted August 7, 2006 2:10 PM
• I've caught a few fake licenses in my time on the Northern border, but again those were states that I regularly saw identification from and so that helped a great deal. Another problem here is that management and everyone else thinks that a driver’s license is sufficient to prove citizenship when that is not the case. A driver’s license means that the state/jurisdiction that issued it says it's OK for you to drive a car, and nothing more. If you are coming into the U.S. from outside, you should have a passport. A U.S. citizen can't go to anybody else's country without a passport, so why do we allow it? Particularly with Canada where their immigration/refugee policies have let some potential terrorists in and given them citizenship! Wake up, folks. It's convenience or security. You can't have both. GovExec.com reader Posted August 8, 2006 7:57 AM
• A bartender probably sees mostly driver's licenses that are issued by the state in which the bar is located, which enables the bartender to spot a fake one fairly easily. However, officers at the border are inundated with literally thousands of ID documents, ranging from driver's licenses and permits from all 50 states and Canada and Mexico, not to mention passports from every country on earth, birth certificates from every city, town, village and county in the United States, etc. On top of that, the officers are under a great deal of pressure from their bosses, local chambers of commerce, business interests, etc. to expedite the flow of people and commerce into the United States, which only increases every year. Unless we standardize our IDs with national ID cards, biometrics, or machine-readable passports, this problem will not only continue, but will get worse. Having experienced this first hand, I don't envy those officers at the borders, who truly have a thankless, yet vital, job. GovExec.com reader Posted August 3, 2006 1:43 PM