McLEAN, Va.—A recently completed expansion and upgrade of a forensics laboratory operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will help the agency better support its front line agents and other law enforcers as well as keep pace with increasingly sophisticated threats, the ICE official oversees the lab said on Wednesday at the grand re-opening of the facility.
There has been a proliferation of technology that makes it easier for criminals and other adversaries that is “readily available at their fingertips that they just didn’t have before” and can be purchased “off-the-shelf” to, for example, make fraudulent documents that previously would have “required a pretty sophisticated network to produce,” Patrick “PJ” Lechleitner, deputy assistant director for the ICE Homeland Security Investigations Cyber Division and the renovated Forensics Lab, told reporters at the re-opening. This is just the nature “of the evolution of technology,” he said, but the facility “expansion gives us the tools to enable our experts to more accurately attack that challenge.”
Lechleitner lauded the expertise of the ICE analysts at the Forensics Lab but said we “need to evolve with the technology” that adversaries are taking advantage of.
The renovations and expansion of the Forensics Lab were completed in May and the facility went from 30,000 square feet to 40,000. The lab hosts a number of smaller labs and capabilities including questioned document examination, latent fingerprint analysis, a chemistry lab for vulnerability testing of federal, state and local government travel documents, a reference laboratory with a trove of domestic and foreign identity documents for comparative analysis, digital media exploitation focused primarily on voice enhancement and video surveillance forensics.
The Forensics Lab also enables its analysts and examiners to build on their own expertise, which translates into improving the training of agents and officers to better detect fraudulent documents in the field and the expansion and renovation further augment these capabilities, Lechleitner said.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who cut the ribbon to officially open the renovated facility, said he’s “proud” of the expanded capabilities, “particularly in the age of the foreign terrorist fighter, this type of capability, having a world class capability of this type, is crucial to our homeland security mission.”
Johnson noted that the ICE Forensics Lab did the analysis on the 9/11 hijackers’ travel documents, noting that with the foreign fighter threat and the “prospect of travel by terrorists sponsored by terrorist organizations, it is crucial that in the Department of Homeland Security we have this type of capability.” He added that the facility is the “preeminent forensics lab for analyzing travel documents we have across the entire United States government.”
With the renovation, the lab was able to expand the space and equipment it uses. The latent fingerprint analysis section plans currently has six analysts and plans to hire two more, which will help with the quality of work it does and turnaround times for its customers, officials said.
The backlog in the fingerprint lab runs between 30 and 90 days and can be less depending on the items that come in to be analyzed. Those items run the gamut of firearms, drug packages, compact discs and the like.
The reference document library is around 10 times the size of the previous space, allowing documents to be organized for easy access, officials said. The digital media analysis area is also expanded and includes new equipment, they said, adding that the same is true with the chemistry lab used to test documents for vulnerabilities.