The Border Patrol will permanently assign intelligence agents to the Coast Guard’s operations center in San Juan Puerto Rico under a new agreement aimed at improving the flow of information and joint operations between the two Homeland Security agencies.

The agreement grew out of the establishment in July 2006 of the Caribbean Border Interagency Group (CBIG) to help stem the flow of illegal migrants from the Dominican Republic across the Mona Passage to the United States territory of Puerto Rico. The CBIG is an attempt to unify the efforts of Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Air and Marine, Office of Field Operations, Border Patrol, the Coast Guard and the United States Attorney’s Office in Puerto Rico.

“CBIG through the high level of cooperation and coordination among all of our partners is paying dividends,” Capt. James Tunstall, commander of the San Juan Sector, said in a statement. “Over the past year we have observed a 38 percent reduction in illegal migrants attempting to reach our shores. This is due in large part to the sharing and fusion of intelligence, the detection and interdiction of illegal migrants at sea, and the successful prosecution of those attempting to enter our country illegally.”

One reason fewer Dominicans have been making the dangerous trip across the Mona Passage by sea is because Coast Guard cutters patrolling those waters in the past year are equipped with fingerprint collection devices used to search the identities of interdicted migrants against the U.S. VISIT database. Migrants’ fingerprints that aren’t already on the database are automatically enrolled in it. If the Coast Guard obtains a hit against the database from the fingerprints of a migrant aboard a cutter, the Border Patrol’s help is usually needed in San Juan to analyze the background of the individual to help the Coast Guard decide what action needs to be taken next, an agency spokesman told Defense Daily.