Former President Barack Obama’s leadership was plagued by loads of corruption cases that made his administration to be extremely controversial. Such include the Department of Homeland Security which terribly failed to equip its employees at the border with the tools they needed to discharge their duties.
A new report that was released by conservative watchdog Judicial Watch, reveals that the IT system that Customs and Border Protection agents use is unreliably slow, frequently blacks out and fails to prevent entry to foreigners with harmful intent.
Thousands of CBP agents rely on the IT system, yet a DHS inspector general’s report revealed that the faulty systems are not reliable.
“CBP’s IT systems and infrastructure did not fully support its border security objective of preventing the entry of inadmissible aliens to the country,” the report states. “The slow performance of a critical pre-screening system greatly reduced Office of Field Operations officers’ ability to identify any passengers who may represent concerns, including national security threats.”
“Further, incoming passenger screening at U.S. international airports was hampered by frequent system outages that created passenger delays and public safety risks. The outages required that CBP officers rely on backup systems that weakened the screening process, leading to officers potentially being unable to identify travelers that may be attempting to enter the United States with harmful intent,” it adds.
The report found out that the problems weren’t limited to the CBP’s IT systems. It highlighted additional problems that included “network outages [that] hindered air and marine surveillance operations” and problems with the Border Patrol’s computer system, known as e3, which the report said is “famously slow and suffers lots of outages,” according to Judicial Watch.
It turns out that the ineffective Border Patrol system prevented agents from “[carrying] out border apprehension and enforcement activities” and prevented agents from using a shared portal with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which meant that agents frequently did not meet “court deadlines for submitting information about criminal aliens for possible prosecution,” the DHS report said.
Judicial Watch noted that CBP is the largest law enforcement agency in the country and it has more than 60,000 employees and an annual budget of $13 billion.
Fortunately, one of President Trump’s central campaign promise was to be tough on immigration. Trump emphasized that he would limit the number of visas that are issued annually, limit immigration from countries that are traditionally hostile to the U.S., and he also vowed to build a wall on the Southern U.S. border.
It’s now obvious that the agency that’s charged with the responsibility of protecting America’s borders needs a massive IT update. Former President Obama wasn’t concerned with increased illegal immigration and other immigration reforms. However, that’s not the case with Trump.
