The DHS intelligence sharing it is and isn’t doing
that sometimes focuses on the chases by Border Patrol agents between the ports of entry, but the routine processing of hundreds of thousands of individuals each day who legally seek entry. In fact, the report states that one intelligence agency, our Coast Guard, is doing a very satisfactory job sharing information regarding foreigners seeking entry to our country. It even offers up the USCG as a model for other DHS agencies to emulate.
After analyzing the data and interviewing the leadership involved in this data sharing, the OIG findings develops eight recommendations meant to resolve the problems identified. What keeps popping out of this fifty-four page report, however, is that these DHS intelligence agencies still are either using data sets which incorporate the wrong information, or data sets powered by out-dated software systems, or that certain agencies simply are loathe to share their intelligence information with other DHS agencies. Very few DHS agencies, it seems, want to share intelligence information with the TSA unless literally forced by law to do so.
There is another issue here which is at one and the same time both alarming and revealing: DHS says “no” to three out of seven recommendations made by its own Office of the Inspector General. DHS says “no” to the Entry-Exit Registration System even though its own self-report documents the many failures and redundancies in this program. It also says “no” to protecting the length of time individuals are detained through the Asylum Pre-Screening System data base, again in spite of documented problems. Last but no least, DHS says “no” to providing complete intelligence about foreign nationals seeking entry into our country to the TSA; DHS consistently acts as if it does trust one of its own agencies. Incredibly DHS disagrees with 43% of the recommendations made by its own self-report.
That leaves four no-brainer recommendations that the DHS agrees to, all recommendations that a reasonable person would have hoped DHS would have adopted as best practices many years ago.
This OIG self-study cant be summed up by the amazing statement which is somewhat lost in the fifty four pages in which it is immersed: “…some relationships among law enforcement components on the northern and southern borders…struggle with mission overlap and inadequate information sharing.”
Technology in this case is not to blame; the technology could have been fixed long ago by human decision-makers. But as long as agencies within DHS “struggle” between and among themselves over software systems and turf, our nation’s security suffers. The observation does not deny DHS’s tremendous strides since 9/11, but calls into question the impact of both inadequate decision-making with regard to the uses of technology as well as bureaucratic turf wars detrimental to our national security.
That DHS would ignore 43 percent of the recommendations made by its own investigative arm is cause for concern. At the same time this OIG report begs the question of what an independent audit of these same DHS agencies by a separate entity, an entity totally free from any institutional interference by DHS, might uncover. By their very nature institutional self-studies always err on the side of caution and restraint. Surely when it comes to issues of national security, the OIG study of DHS information sharing at our borders should not be an end unto itself but rather a preliminary step to fix what remains broken. In the meantime our national security remains at risk.
Robert Lee Maril, a professor of Sociology at East Carolina University and founding director of the Center for Diversity and Inequality Research, is the author of The Fence: National Security, Public Safety, and Illegal Immigration along the U.S.-Mexico Border He blogs at leemaril.com.
