DHS Fails To Close The Border

Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano announced this week that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was halting its effort to build a virtual fence along the southern border. Called the Secure Border Initiative Network, or SBINet, this was a program to use electronic surveillance to complement border fences and expansion of Border Patrol agents along the southern border. The idea was to be able to detect people moving across sections of the border under surveillance and direct Border Patrol agents to intercept them.

The SBINet program suffered from a number of difficulties, ranging from reliability issues with its commercially-based hardware, the Border Patrol’s lack of a concept of operations for employing the system and the challenge of trying to work with multiple federal, state, local, tribal and private entities that control much of the border. But SBINet was finally proving itself. It was getting good reviews from the Border Patrol agents who worked with the system. The initial deployment near Tucson was going through operational testing with great success. A second section was under construction.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), to be released today, is reportedly highly critical of SBINet. What the GAO fails to do, unfortunately quite often, is set its analysis in any context. So, it will not point out the all the challenges the program has had to surmount including changes in requirements and scope, unpredictable funding, squabbling between government agencies, and the need to familiarize the Border Patrol with how to operate and utilize the products of the system.

Since there are no plans to expand the portion of the southern border that is fenced or to increase the number of Border Patrol agents, it would seem that DHS is out of options when it comes to controlling the border. It is ironic, to say the least, that Napolitano’s decision comes as the level of violence along the southern border is reaching a new high.

The southern border is in most urgent need of attention. But the northern border with Canada is in some ways even more problematic. While there are not the problems of drug smuggling and illegal immigration that threaten to overwhelm the Mexican government, the geography of the northern border is extremely difficult and the sheer length of that border makes establishing control difficult. Forget about fences or Border Patrol agents on horseback. Unless DHS figures out a technology-based solution to the problem, neither the northern nor the southern borders will never be secured.

The Subcommittee on Border, Maritime and Global Counterterrorism and Subcommittee on Management, Investigations, and Oversight will hold a joint hearing today on SBINet. While the focus of the hearings will be on the performance of SBINet to date, the committees need to ask two very important questions. The first question is can the defects in the system be fixed? The second, and more important question is if not SBINet, how does DHS plan to secure our borders?