A supplemental funding request delivered to Congress last Thursday that would provide billions of dollars in military assistance to Ukraine also includes $323 million for Customs and Border Protection to support the deployment of imaging technology to interdict fentanyl and other illegal drugs coming into the U.S. through ports of entry.
The $323 million contained in the fiscal year 2024 supplemental would be an addition to $305.4 million CBP is seeking in its FY ’24 budget request for non-intrusive inspection (NII) systems, which can image the contents of vehicles and cargo conveyances as they pass through the electronic scanners.
House appropriators have approved the budget request. It is unclear from the Senate’s bill whether they approved the $305.4 million.
The House version of the bill directs that $201 million be used for civil works projects to support installation of the NII systems, $65.3 million to purchase and deploy new NII systems, $14 million for smaller computed tomography-based scanners to screen mail and parcels at mail and express consignment courier facilities, $12.5 million for related artificial intelligence, and $12.1 million for system integration and meta data.
A report accompanying the Senate appropriators’ bill does not address the funding levels but like the House expresses concerns that CBP’s plans for NII systems that scan passenger-occupied vehicles do not fully embrace scanning under the vehicles, which is where drug smugglers are increasingly hiding their illicit contraband.
“Systems being deployed with a top-down only x-ray system may have difficulty identifying narcotics concealed in the under-vehicle,” the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations report says. House appropriators in their report say only one-third of the NII passenger vehicle screening systems that CBP plans to deploy can inspect the underside of a car.
CBP is acquiring low-energy NII portals from three companies: Astrophysics, Leidos [LDOS], and OSI Systems [OSIS] Rapiscan Systems Division. Viken Detection is supplying its backscatter-based under vehicle detection system as part of Leidos’ low-energy portal (LEP) for screening passenger vehicles.
If Congress ultimately approves the $305.4 million budget request for NII systems and the $323 million included in the supplemental, that would be one of the largest amounts of funding ever for NII systems. The supplemental bill does not break out how the proposed NII funding would be spent.
In addition to LEPs, CBP is acquiring multi-energy portals from Leidos, Rapiscan and Smiths Detection to scan trucks without requiring occupants in the cab to exit the vehicle. The LEP and MEP systems are being installed at pre-primary inspection lanes at land ports of entry to significantly increase the number of passenger vehicles and cargo entering the U.S.
The agency declined this week in response to queries by Defense Daily to disclose how many LEP and MEP systems are currently operational “due to law enforcement sensitivities.” CBP said that it is “focused on deploying 123 large-scale drive-through NII systems to increase the cumulative vehicle scanning rate at Southwest border ports of entry from two percent to approximately 40 percent scanning of passenger vehicles, and from 15-17 percent to more than 70 percent scanning of commercial vehicles.”
The agency has said it hopes to get to the higher scanning rates in the next two to three years.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in June approved a bill that directs CBP to scan at least 40 percent of passenger vehicles and 90 percent of commercial vehicles entering the U.S. through land ports of entry by Sept. 30, 2026.
The supplemental request also includes $20.7 million for the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate for research and developing into stopping the flow of fentanyl into the country. If the funding is approved, S&T would work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to automatically fuse data and expand data analytics to “target criminal networks and their activities.”