Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is not ready to “fully enforce” the requirement that all United States citizens, legal U.S. residents, Canadians, Bermudians and Mexicans have an acceptable form of documentation when entering the U.S. and land ports of entry and hasn’t analyzed the impact full compliance would have on secondary inspection, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General’s Office says in a new report.
The land and sea rule of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) that went into effect on June 1, 2009 requires select people such as U.S., Mexican and Canadian citizens show certain government identification such as a passport or birth certificate upon entry at the U.S. land and sea ports. However, CBP isn’t fully enforcing the requirement and instead is following a policy of “informed compliance,” which aims to encourage compliance while not “unnecessarily inconveniencing those who are uninformed,” the IG says in the report, Customs and Border Protection’s Implementation of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative at Land Ports of Entry (OIG-11-16).
The IG cites CBP as saying the goal of informed compliance is to increase compliance rates over time, although in the first eight months of the rule being in effect shows no improvement since the second month.
The IG says that most people entering the United States at the land ports of entry who are not compliant with WHTI are not being referred to secondary inspection. It says that in the first eight months the rule was in effect, CBP officers only referred 9,000 non-compliant travelers to secondary inspection of a potential 2.3 million people.
Overall, the compliance rate has been 96 percent, with the rate at northern border states being 98 percent and at southern border states 93 percent, the IG says. Even though the compliance rates are high, the few percent of non-compliance still means a substantial number of travelers could be referred to secondary, stressing the related resources and infrastructure, the report says.
Of the 2.3 million people who were non-compliant from June 1, 2009 through Jan. 31, 2010, the IG says 1.1 million of those entered the country in Texas, a number that would be 1.7 million if factored annually.
The IG says that CBP has not studied what the impact would be on staffing and infrastructure of sending non-compliant travelers to secondary inspection.
“CBP has not determined whether the ports have sufficient resources, such as CBP officers, computer workstations, and parking spaces to accommodate WHTI-noncompliant travelers who may be referred to the secondary inspection areas,” the IG says. “Our analysis determined that CBP may not have enough officers or infrastructure to support an average 73 percent increase in secondary workload.”
For example, the report says CBP estimates that if it were to send all non-compliant travelers to secondary inspection, the workload would increase by 15 percent. However, the IG says it believes the workload would increase on average by 73 percent at its 39 highest volume ports.
The report also says that during FY ’08 and FY ’09 CBP received $365 million to implement WHTI at land ports of entry yet no funds were used to increase the capacity of secondary inspection areas.
“Our analysis indicated some ports may not be able to handle the increased secondary inspection volume under full enforcement of WHTI,” the IG says.
The IG also says that CBP hasn’t finalized the operating procedures to process non-compliant travelers once full WHTI enforcement is implemented. Moreover, CBP still hasn’t determined when it will move to full WHTI compliance enforcement at the land ports of entry, it says.