Border securityDHS late developing new measure for border security

A little more than two years ago, DHS officials told Congress that they would design a new method to produce more accurate statistics on security at the nation’s border.Last week the department acknowledged that it has not created this method, and will not for some time.

Before 2010, border officials used a method known as “operational control” to assess the level of security along the southwest line, but in 2010, the New York Times reports, DHS secretary Janet Napolitano informed employees at DHS  that they should drop the standard because it  insufficiently accounted for the changing terrain and fast-changing conditions in limited patrol sectors, among other reasons.

David Aguilar, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), said that the operational control method was meant to describe immediate conditions in limited patrol sectors, but that it was misused when it became the broadest measure of security advances across the entire border.

“It was never meant to be applied that way,” Aguilar told the Times.

During a hearing on Wednesday in the House of Representatives, Mark Borkowski, a senior DHS official, told Democratic and Republican lawmakers that DHS has not made any progress on a method to measure border conditions. The lawmakers,   angry to hear that, said that the failure by Obama’s administration could delay the passing of immigration legislation.

Officials for the administration said late last week that among the reasons they have not produced a single measure for border security is that  the president did not want any obstacles that would prevent a path for immigrants to become citizens.

The officials also said that security conditions along the border could be altered depending on where traffickers and drug smugglers try to bring contraband into the United States and where border agents are concentrating their technology and resources.

“While border security is complex and cannot be measured in a single metric,” Peter Boogaard, a spokesman for the DHS, told the  Times. “in every metric available to measure progress, we’re heading in the right direction, including decreased apprehensions and increased seizures.”

Lawmakers  are not happy with the lack of results that DHS has reported.

“We do not want the Department of Homeland Security to be the stumbling block to comprehensive immigration reform for this country,” Representative Candice Miller, (R-Michigan),  the chairwoman of the House Homeland Security subcommittee on border security, told Borkowski.

Miller went on to say that the lack of security measurements from the administration “could be a component of our failure to pass something I think is very important for our country.”

Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, a Democrat, did not mince words.

“I would say to the department, you’ve got to get in the game,” Lee said.

Many members of Congress have said that in order to pass a bill on immigration, they will need to have an accurate evaluation of border security, and they  have been pushing  Napolitano to create a way to judge whether the administration’s claims of significant progress in border enforcement are true.

“We need to have a measurement,” Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) insisted at a hearing in the Senate last week. “We need to assure the American people that we have effective control of the border and we have made advances to achieve that,” he said. “I need to have something to assure people they are not going to live in fear.”

Miller and Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said they are currently drafting legislation which would mandate that administration officials produce border security measurements if these officials do not create their own in the next few weeks.

Borkowski said last week that the department has been working on what they call the Border Condition Index. The index will assemble a group of variables, including crime rates in towns along the border, daily flows of legitimate travelers and commerce through ports of entry, and more. According to the officials working on the index, it will provide a broad but simple view of enforcement along the border.

Borkowski said at the hearing that he does not have a time frame for when the security index will be ready, and that it will not be useful to assess border security during negotiations over a comprehensive immigration bill.

Lawmakers were quick to respond.  on the attack.

“I’ve been operating under the assumption for the last several years,” Miller said at the hearing, that the index would be something that “anybody or any other agency vetting this would be using as a measurement.”