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Officials Concede Failures On Gauging Border Security

Major Obstacle To Immigration Reform
Roque Planas
By 

National Reporter, HuffPost

FILE - This Oct. 2, 2012 file photo shows U.S. Border Patrol agents patrolling the border fence near Naco, Ariz. In the midst of a national conversation about immigration reform, where questions of border security figure heavily, the Obama administration switched from daily declarations that the border with Mexico is as secure as it's ever been to warning of the increasingly dire implications of hacking $754 million from Customs and Border Protection among nearly $3 billion from the Department of Homeland Security in the remaining half of the fiscal year. The cuts have affected the border and immigration enforcement in various ways, most visibly with the release of more than 2,000 immigrants from detention centers in states including Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia and Texas (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, file)
FILE - This Oct. 2, 2012 file photo shows U.S. Border Patrol agents patrolling the border fence near Naco, Ariz. In the midst of a national conversation about immigration reform, where questions of border security figure heavily, the Obama administration switched from daily declarations that the border with Mexico is as secure as it's ever been to warning of the increasingly dire implications of hacking $754 million from Customs and Border Protection among nearly $3 billion from the Department of Homeland Security in the remaining half of the fiscal year. The cuts have affected the border and immigration enforcement in various ways, most visibly with the release of more than 2,000 immigrants from detention centers in states including Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia and Texas (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, file)

More than two years after Homeland Security officials told Congress that they would produce new, more accurate standards to assess security at the nation’s borders, senior officials from the department acknowledged this week that they had not completed the new measurements and were not likely to in coming months, as the debate proceeds about overhauling the immigration system.

Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers were taken aback at a hearing on Wednesday in the House of Representatives when Mark Borkowski, a senior Homeland Security official, said he had no progress to report on a broad measure of border conditions the department had been working on since 2010. The lawmakers warned that failure by the Obama administration to devise a reliable method of border evaluation could imperil passage of immigration legislation.

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Before You Go

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