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 According to a recent report in the Associated Press, more than 21,000 people who should not have been allowed to enter the United States came through official border crossing points between Oct. 1, 2005, and Sept. 30, 2006.
According to a recent government report, after the 2001 terror attacks, the government reorganized its border security operations to focus more on terrorism as opposed to illegal immigration. As a result, officials increased security measures to prevent people from falsifying travel documents to enter the country through such legal entry points as airports and border crossings.
The Government Accountability Office report found that Customs and Border Protection officers turned away 200,000 people who tried to enter through the 326 legal air, sea and land entry points during the 2006 budget year. The GAO’s findings are based on a statistical estimate of the number of people who may have passed through the entry points, Customs and Border Protection’s deputy commissioner, Jayson P. Ahern, said.
The fact is that the government does not know how many people passed through checkpoints that should not have been allowed into the country. In an exercise in stating the obvious, officials conceded that improvements are needed. “The point is that we need to actually do a better job,” Ahern told Eileen Sullivan of the Associated Press.
Customs, as mandated by Congress, has stepped up efforts to make sure everyone who enters the country has a valid document, he said, and about 400 million people enter the United States through legal checkpoints every year.
Staffing shortages and inept management at legal border crossings are among the reasons that people got through improperly, according to the report from the GAO. A publicly released version of its report states “several thousand” of these people made it past Customs and Border Protection officers.
One official who wished to remain anonymous for fear of on the job reprisals said that Customs has more detailed information and that the number is probably over 21,000. The Democratic chairman of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee said these numbers should be a warning for the Homeland Security Department, which oversees border entry operations.
“As we continue to pump more resources into virtual and real fences between our ports of entry, we cannot afford to lose sight of other vulnerabilities at our borders,” Rep. Bennie Thompson said. Thompson referred to the tens of millions of dollars going toward a fence along the southwest border to prevent people from illegally entering the U.S. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites        
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