On September 30, the DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) — the department’s internal watchdog — issued another report with a lengthy and anodyne title: “CBP, ICE, and TSA Did Not Fully Assess Risks Associated with Releasing Noncitizens without Identification into the United States and Allowing Them to Travel on Domestic Flights”. Its 37 pages underscore the risks of the Biden-Harris administration’s migrant “catch and release” schemes, but all you need to read is one line:
Under current processes, CBP and ICE cannot ensure they are keeping high-risk noncitizens without identification from entering the country.
The Legal Immigration Process. When foreign nationals seek to come to the United States legally, they must go through a two-step vetting process.
First (assuming they aren’t from a “visa-waiver” country), they must apply for a visa with the U.S. State Department and submit to an interview with a consular officer.
During that process, applicants must establish their identities, prove that they do not have any diseases or crimes that would render them inadmissible to the United States, and show that they do not pose a national-security risk.
If applicants fail to satisfy any of those requirements, they don’t get a visa and can’t come here legally.
Should they be issued a visa, they must then submit to a second vetting at the port of entry by a CBP officer in the agency’s Office of Field Operations. Again, they must prove who they are and show that they are not inadmissible from the United States on any of the medical, criminal, national security, and other grounds listed in section 212(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
Those aliens bear the burden of proving that they are not inadmissible on any ground, and if they can’t CBP is supposed to either turn them around and send them back or detain them until an immigration judge can determine their admissibility and/or eligibility for immigration “relief”.
“Catch and Release” and the Commonality of Discarded Border Documents. You should understand that the process I have described above has more or less been the rule for aliens seeking admission to this country since at least 1903. But it has, at most, best been honored in the breach under the current administration.
IDs discarded by illegal border-crossers.
Instead of detaining all those inadmissible “applicants for admission” as section 235 of the INA describes them, DHS under Biden-Harris has released more than 5.6 million of them into the United States, a figure that grows by tens of thousands monthly.
If you have been to the physical border over the past three-plus years, one of the things you will see are piles of identity documents on the ground: passports, driver’s licenses, foreign residence cards, etc.
Personally, I carry my license everywhere I go, and usually take my passport when I’m boarding a flight to ensure that if I lose my wallet I can still get home. So why would inadmissible applicants for admission (including illegal entrants) want to ditch their IDs?
There are two reasons. First, if those documents show that an alien is firmly resettled in a third country (as with many Haitians in Brazil and Chile, for example), it’s less likely the alien will be granted asylum.
Second, many of those individuals don’t want the U.S. government knowing who they really are, usually because they have something to hide.
The Challenges of Boarding an Airliner. Most illegal migrants and other inadmissible applicants for admission released into the United States by the Biden-Harris DHS don’t want to stay at the border indefinitely. They want to head into the interior of the United States, to places like Florida, California, and New York, where they have jobs and assistance (taxpayer-funded and otherwise) awaiting them.
It’s a long walk from Brownsville to Bensonhurst, however, and while most take ground transportation, others prefer to fly.
The problem — at least theoretically — is that ever since September 11th, DHS’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA) makes it a challenge for just anyone to board an airliner in this country. Even grandmas from Des Moines are supposed to present certain valid government-issued IDs and submit to a rather intrusive inspection process before they are allowed anywhere near the departure gate.
As the DHS OIG report explains, however, even if you don’t have a necessary government-issued ID with you, you can still fly provided you “validate your identity through other means” by presenting other IDs, signing a form, and undergoing a TSA vetting.
Of course, such rules only apply to U.S. citizens and legal immigrants. If you’re an alien without an acceptable ID, “TSA will use DHS-issued documents to initiate procedures to validate ‘that the individual presenting the document is the same individual previously processed by DHS’”.
As the comedian Yakov Smirnoff used to say, “America, what a country!”
“CBP and ICE Cannot Always Verify the Identity of Noncitizens without Identification.” That, of course, raises the question of how the DHS immigration-enforcement agencies — CBP and ICE — can verify the identities of aliens who show up without any documents. Short answer: In many cases, they can’t.
Inadmissible applicants for admission — again, including illegal entrants — encountered at the borders and ports are issued “alien numbers” (A-numbers), a unique nine-digit code those aliens are supposed to use as their personal identifiers. That A-number appears on their alien files and DHS-issued forms, such as Notices to Appear (NTAs), the charging documents in removal proceedings.
It’s sort of used like a Social Security number for foreign nationals, and as you likely know, before you — a U.S. citizen — receive a Social Security number (or a REAL-ID compliant driver’s license), you (or your parents) must prove you are who you say you are.
So, do those inadmissible applicants for admission at the borders and ports have to prove that they are who they claim? Well, no. As OIG explains: “If the noncitizens do not have identification, CBP and ICE immigration officers accept noncitizens’ self-reported biographical information and use this information to populate” the government forms they issue.
Not to worry, though, because those agencies “also collect photographs and fingerprints. Additionally, a DNA sample may be collected from noncitizens over 14 years old”.
You’ve likely realized that whole process is insecure, but if not let me explain.
Imagine that you are a wanted criminal or other bad actor from Freedonia named Rufus T. Firefly. The Freedonian government is seeking your arrest, but they don’t have any biometrics for you.
You then come to the United States and tell CBP that you are actually Pinky Chicolini, but you don’t have any documents to prove your identity. CBP has only limited access to Freedonian records, and just a brief period to vet you anyway, so they accept the Chicolini identity, take fingerprints that will in the future identify you as Chicolini, and issue you an A-number under the name “Pinky Chicolini”.
Maybe ICE will assume custody of you and do a slightly deeper dive, but those searches are likely to be unavailing as well. When and if you get released, you will receive a “breeder document” in the Chicolini alias courtesy of DHS.
How many inadmissible applicants for admission who failed to present identification documents during the inspection process are CBP and ICE releasing into the United States? As OIG explains:
We requested data on the number of noncitizens who did not have identification and were released into the United States from FYs 2021 through 2023. Because immigration officers are not required to document whether a noncitizen presented identification in the databases, the data we obtained may be incomplete. Therefore, neither CBP nor ICE could determine how many of the millions of noncitizens seeking entry in the United States each year entered without identification and whose self-reported biographic information was accepted. [Emphasis added.]
Not to worry, however: “CBP and ICE immigration officers [OIG] interviewed acknowledged the risks of allowing noncitizens without identification into the country.” That’s a relief.
The problem is that, notwithstanding their acknowledgment of those risks, as OIG noted, “neither CBP nor ICE conducted a comprehensive risk assessment for these noncitizens to assess the level of risk these individuals present and developed corresponding mitigation measures”.
To determine how widespread this practice is, OIG observed CBP port-of-entry officers and Border Patrol agents while they processed 53 migrants at various Southwest border ports and Border Patrol stations. Of that group of 53 aliens, seven (13 percent) had no identification at all.
Multiply that by 5.6 million and you come up with 728,000, which is larger than the population of Seattle, Washington, D.C., or Nashville.
Back to the TSA Checkpoint. Of course, TSA isn’t just going to accept any random piece of paper purportedly issued by CBP or ICE before they allow you to board a large metal tube that flies hundreds of people thousands of feet in the air. No — they are going to validate that piece of paper using the vaunted CBP One app.
Specifically, the TSA officer takes a picture of the migrant presenting the document using the app and the app attempts to match that photograph with the information DHS captured during that initial processing.
According to OIG: “If a match is found, CBP One returns a photograph of the noncitizen and a green check mark with the first name, last name, date of birth, and A-number of the traveler. If the application cannot confirm a match, CBP One returns a red ‘X’”.
Due to redactions in that OIG report, it’s not entirely clear what happens if an alien gets the red X, but it appears that TSA then contacts a “call center” somewhere to check some other unspecified information. I’m not sure why that redacted passage is so sensitive, but it gives me pause (and I have some experience in national-security vetting).
I don’t want to leave you with the impression that the green checkmark leaves the alien free to just head to the gate. Apparently, migrants who are cleared by the CBP One system still receive some enhanced attention from TSA officers (pat downs or “Advanced Imaging Technology and Explosive Trace Detection”) before they can continue.
Note, however, that none of this likely would have stopped Ramzi Yousef, the Kuwaiti-born mastermind of the first (February 1993) World Trade Center bombing, who arrived at JFK in September 1992 with an accomplice and was stopped because the passport he offered was fraudulent.
The accomplice (Ahmed Ajaj) was detained because he was carrying bomb-making manuals (this was before Google), but Yousef was released because nothing turned up during his intensive search.
By the way — Yousef isn’t Yousef; he’s really “Abdul Basit”, but he might as well be Rufus T. Firefly.
Alternatively, TSA can skip the CBP One pretense and contact the National Transportation Vetting Center, but as the OIG report explains in a footnote: “As of April 2024, 229 airports across the country were using CBP One.” That suggests that most TSA officers are relying on the app.
“At Least 1.7 Million Potential National Security Threats”. Which brings me to an interim staff report issued by the House Judiciary Committee on October 3, titled “The Biden-Harris Border Crisis: At Least 1.7 Million Potential National Security Threats”.
According to that report, “more than 1.7 million special interest aliens — meaning aliens from 26 countries that DHS has determined pose the greatest national security and counterintelligence threats to the United States” — have been encountered by CBP over the past three-plus years.
Worse, the committee reports that the Biden-Harris CBP has released aliens notwithstanding the fact that they appeared on the terror watchlist and released other migrants only to discover after the fact that they too were watch-listed.
How many of them were Rufus T. Fireflys aka: Ramzi Yousefs aka: Abdul Basits who showed up without any identification but were released anyway? There’s no way to know, but 13 percent of 1.7 million is 221,000 — roughly the population of Salt Lake City.
“Border Security — Travel, Entry, and Immigration — Was Not Seen as a National Security Matter.” All of this harkens back to the July 2004 final report of the 9/11 Commission, which explained:
When people travel internationally, they usually move through defined channels, or portals. They may seek to acquire a passport. They may apply for a visa. They stop at ticket counters, gates, and exit controls at airports and seaports. Upon arrival, they pass through inspection points. They may transit to another gate to get on an airplane. Once inside the country, they may seek another form of identification and try to enter a government or private facility. They may seek to change immigration status in order to remain.
Each of these checkpoints or portals is a screening — a chance to establish that people are who they say they are and are seeking access for their stated purpose, to intercept identifiable suspects, and to take effective action.
The job of protection is shared among these many defined checkpoints. By taking advantage of them all, we need not depend on any one point in the system to do the whole job. The challenge is to see the common problem across agencies and functions and develop a conceptual framework — an architecture — for an effective screening system.
The whole purpose of the commission and the recommendations it issued was to identify vulnerabilities and to shore up that screening system — from the State Department to airliners to the ports of entry — to protect the American people from the national-security risks they faced and still face.
Every one of us is impacted by those fixes: from the DMV when applying for our compliant IDs to the bank when we open up an account or request a loan to the TSA checkpoint when we want to go see our grandmas in Des Moines.
Security rules are only for Americans and legal aliens, apparently, because if OIG is right, the whole system as currently implemented by the administration for the benefit of illegal migrants is fatally flawed.
It’s ironic that the commission ultimately concluded: “In the decade before September 11, 2001, border security — encompassing travel, entry, and immigration — was not seen as a national security matter.” As the OIG report reveals, thanks to the Biden-Harris administration’s catch-and-release policies, we are back to living in that pre-9/11 world. Like we need another disaster to deal with.