Later this year Customs and Border Protection (CBP) plans to begin a new pilot program that will use biometric technology based on capturing face and iris images to help verify the departure of foreign nationals from the United States, an agency official told a Senate panel on Wednesday.
CBP, working with the airlines, needs to “figure out a biometric…that you can take without creating gridlock and take two hours to board a plane,” John Wagner, deputy assistant commissioner of CBP’s Office of Field Operations, told the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest.
CBP currently has ongoing pilot tests of mobile fingerprint technology at the top 10 U.S. airports for international departures and the preliminary results are that this concept is “favorable” but “expensive” and isn’t going to be feasible at large airports, Wagner said. Combining the CBP staffing and the mobile fingerprint systems to deploy the more than 2,000 international departure gates in U.S. airports amounts to $1 billion annually, he said, adding that won’t do.
The Biometric Exit Mobile, also called BE-Mobile, began last July. The upcoming biometric exit field trial using “new technologies in collecting face and iris images from foreign nationals” leaving the United States from an airport “will help CBP determine the feasibility of collecting biometrics ‘on the move,’ which will greatly assist in deploying a nationwide program,” Wagner said in his written statement provided to the panel.
Wagner said it will take a year for CBP to complete the new pilot and report on the results.
The CBP official said that the BE-Mobile solution will likely work at small and mid-size airports where there are fewer international departures.
Congress in 1996 mandated that the government establish a biometric entry and exit solution for foreign nationals entering and leaving the country. In 2006, under the US-VISIT program, the Department of Homeland Security achieved full operational capability of a biometric entry solution, but the exit piece has been difficult to come by mainly because the government doesn’t have dedicated space at airports to channel international departures through a chokepoint before passengers board a plane. CBP has maintained that putting biometric exit technology elsewhere at an airport, such as the security checkpoint, doesn’t prevent a person from leaving the airport after the screening process.
CBP currently relies on biographic data collected upon entry into and exit from the United States to verify whether a foreign national had left the country according to their visa requirements. The biometric exit solution is expected to enhance the departure verification.
This week CBP rolled out a facial comparison technology deployment for certain inbound passengers at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York to link travelers to their electronic passports. That technology was first tested at Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C., last year and will be rolled out again at the airport in February, Wagner said.
CBP’s testing of different biometric technologies for arrivals and departures of foreign nationals at airports and also a land port in California has been based in part by a DHS Science and Technology effort to examine these technologies and operating concepts. The Air Entry/Exit Re-engineering project, called AEER, will end this year, a DHS official told the panel.