By Calvin Biesecker
Amid disagreements between the Department of Homeland Security and some members of Congress and state and local politicians over whether the nation’s border regions are becoming more secure, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has directed her department to develop new metrics to measure security and quality of life along the nation’s southwest border.
Napolitano told a Senate committee that the new “index” is being developed by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and will include various law enforcement and third party data. The agency is also “convening a group of independent third party representatives to evaluate and refine any such index,” she said.
Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I/D-Conn.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, welcomed Napolitano’s announcement as “significant,” saying that will “inform the debate” over border security and maybe “create a foundation” for tackling immigration reform. Napolitano agreed, saying there is a “linkage” between policies around legal immigration and border security, a position that was also favored by the Bush administration.
Some in Congress and DHS have been at odds this year over how to measure operational control of the border, the definition of which was put forth in a 2006 congressional law calling for more physical fencing along the southwest border. Lieberman, quoting the Secure Fence Act of 2006, said that operational control is defined as “‘the prevention of all unlawful entries into the U.S., including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism, narcotics and other contraband.'”
However, Lieberman noted that Napolitano and former DHS Secretaries Michael Chertoff and Tom Ridge have all said that achieving total operational control of the border is an “unreachable goal.”
The dispute over whether DHS is making progress in achieving operational control of the border was fueled largely with the release this year of a report by the Government Accountability Office that said only 32 of 4,000 miles of northern border were under operational control by the Border Patrol (Defense Daily, Feb. 2).
Since then, DHS officials have been saying that operational control is a “limited term of art” and that the fact that declining apprehensions of illegal immigrants, the deployment of additional personnel and technological resources to the border regions, in particular the southwest border, increased seizures of illegal drugs, weapons and cash, and other statistical indicators are showing that the nation’s borders are increasingly more secure.
But Napolitano said yesterday that while the current definition of operational control is “archaic” and “doesn’t reflect the reality of what is happening at the border,” more than just traditional measures are needed. These measures will include the impact of illegal border crossing on quality of life, and may include statistics such as traffic accidents involving illegal aliens or narcotics smugglers and impacts on property values, she said.
She said the index must be based on both “qualitative and quantitative” factors that are reliable and validated, complete and transparent, and also based on the “priorities” of border communities.
Napolitano said that it’s not decided whether there will be an index for the northern border and that any index would likely be applied “sector by sector,” referring to how the Border Patrol divvies up the border areas it patrols.
On other matters, Napolitano said that intelligence gathered by U.S. Special Forces who raided Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan on Sunday is already being shared with the Counter-Terrorism Advisory Board, which makes recommendations to her about whether to raise the threat level of the National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS).
So far, Napolitano has decided against elevating the threat level, which requires either information of a credible or credible, specific and impending terrorist threat against the United States. The heightened alerts under the NTAS are designated either elevated threat or imminent threat.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), ranking member of the committee, said she is concerned about attempts by al Qaeda to retaliate for bin Laden’s death and would prefer that the NTAS threat level be increased “to acknowledge that we are in a situation where we are at risk.”
Napolitano said that there is already a baseline level of alert and that additional information is being supplied to the law enforcement community and private sector.
“I think we want to be careful here,” Napolitano said. “We don’t want to say because we suspect, and reasonably so, that at some point there may be retaliation that we go ahead and put the nation into an alert status without more information than we currently have. That could change today, it could change tonight, it could change tomorrow but the whole idea behind the new system is we’re always on alert.”