Border Patrol Establishes More Electronic Links To Fbi Records
The federal government has supplied electronic fingerprint readers and software to all 136 Border Patrol stations nationwide and about one-third of the country’s ports of entry to allow personnel to access FBI records within minutes.
The system was installed from Oct. 1, 2003 to Aug. 31, 2004, during which Border Patrol arrested 8,005 criminal suspects attempting to come into the United States, said Robert C. Bonner, commissioner of Customs and Border Patrol.
He noted that none of the arrests were related to terrorism crimes, but were related to crimes such as murder, kidnapping, assault, sexual assault, robbery, and drugs.
Previously, Border Patrol agents only had access to an aging database called IDENT from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which did not inform users whether a suspect had a criminal record or was a wanted for an offense.
The new scanning system from Identix allows agents to take and send fingerprints and compare them to files in the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) in minutes.
But T. J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, a union of 10,000 Border Patrol agents, notes that the new system does not link to the Terrorist Screening Center, for which agents still have to call an 800-number.
Meanwhile, tests have shown that a certain model of Identix scanner used in the US-VISIT program was only 53 percent accurate, according to Stanford University professor Lawrence Wein, who spoke before the House Homeland Security Committee recently. Robert Bonner said this “may mean that we need to go beyond the two index fingers” in the US-VISIT program.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from the Denton Record-Chronicle (10/07/04); Sniffen, Michael J.