By Calvin Biesecker
With fewer than nine months to go before new travel document requirements go into effect at the nation’s land and sea borders, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) during tonight’s season opener of the National Football League will launch a national education campaign directed at American and Canadian citizens informing them of the requirements and appropriate documents that will best facilitate cross border travel.
The national media blitz for the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) will last two months and include television, print, and online advertising, public service announcements on the radio, a new Web site (http://www.GetYouHome.gov), and collaboration with various travel partners. After that, the communications campaign will narrow its focus to specific areas of the United States and Canada where people appear to be slow in applying for the new travel documents, Thomas Winkowski, assistant commissioner, Office of Field Operations at Customs and Border Protection, told reporters yesterday.
As of January this year, the number of documents U.S. and Canadian citizens could use to enter or re-enter the United States at land and sea borders shrank from around 8,000 to just dozens. Beginning June 1, 2009, that number will shrink even further, making it easier for Customs officers to verify the authenticity of the documents and the identities of the document holders. For the traveling public, the travel documents are meant to help minimize delays at the borders.
With few exceptions, such as military IDs and Merchant Mariner Credentials, both of which must be accompanied by orders, the permitted documents will be Passports, the State Department’s new Passport Card, CBP’s Trusted Traveler cards like NEXUS, SENTRI and FAST, as well as driver’s licenses in states that include enhanced security features. So far just Washington State has issued Enhanced Drivers Licenses and New York is about to in the coming weeks.
In addition to U.S. and Canadian citizens, WHTI also affects Bermudians. The initiative governs travel into the United States from Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean.
The Passport Cards, EDLs and Trusted Traveler cards, all of which are wallet-sized, feature various security features but their common link is a vicinity read Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip embedded in the cards that contains a unique identification number for the individual carrier that is automatically transmitted to the CBP officer at an entry gate. That unique number automatically brings up various data about the cardholder on a display screen, giving the Customs officer both visual and textual information about the person, allowing for quicker identification. Currently information on the travel documents has to be entered manually, adding time to the entry process.
To take advantage of the RFID technology, CBP earlier this year contracted with Unisys [UIS] to begin installing vicinity reader infrastructure at 39 land ports of entry that account for 95 percent of the volume of people entering the United States by land. Winkowski said that the deployment, which is scheduled to begin in the next month or so with operational testing at border crossings in Nogales, Ariz., and Blaine, Wash., is on schedule.
A key benefit of the NEXUS, SENTRI and FAST cards is that they all have dedicated lanes, which can further expedite entry into the United States. However, applicants for these cards go through a more rigorous background screening. The FAST program pertains to truck drivers.
Passports, which have the flexibility of also being allowed at airports, are embedded with a proximity read RFID chip. That means the Customs agents must physically scan the document against a reader for the individual’s information to be displayed.
There are close to 500,000 holders of NEXUS, SENTRI and FAST cards, representing about 10 percent of the average daily cross-border travelers. So far about 400,000 Passport Cards have been issued and Washington State has issued over 25,000 EDLs.
Installation of the RFID infrastructure will cost about $352 million. So far all but $100 million has been appropriated and CBP hopes the remainder will be funded in the FY ’09 budget. On top of that, CBP estimates that it will cost about $5 billion to upgrade the aging infrastructure at the nation’s land border crossings, Winkowski said.