Hardly any of the United States’ northern border with Canada is under acceptable control by the Border Patrol, basically just 32 of nearly 4,000 total miles, necessitating a heavy reliance on local law enforcement, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) says in a report just released.
Moreover, says the report, the Border Patrol only has full situational awareness of about one-quarter, or 1,007 miles of the northern border, which means it “does not have the ability to detect illegal activity across most of the northern border.” The report uses FY ’10 statistics.
The report was released by several leaders of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, including Chairman Joseph Lieberman (I/D-Conn.) and ranking member Susan Collins (R-Maine). They were not pleased with the findings.
“The numbers speak for themselves,” Lieberman said at a press conference to release the report. “These findings should sound a loud alarm to the Department of Homeland Security, the Canadian government, and our committee. The American people are grossly under-protected along our northern border.”
The report, Border Security: Enhanced DHS Oversight and Assessment of Interagency Coordination Is Needed for the Northern Border, was delivered to Congress on Dec. 17, 2010.
Regarding the vast majority of border miles not under acceptable control by the Border Patrol, GAO says these are “defined as vulnerable to exploitation due to issues related to accessibility and resource availability and, as a result, there is a high degree of reliance on law enforcement support from outside the border zone.”
Citing DHS, GAO says that compared to the southern border of the United States where the biggest issues are illegal drug trafficking and illegal immigration, the “terrorist threat on the northern border is higher, given the large expanse of area with limited law enforcement coverage.”