Photo Credit: James Tourtellotte

A major seaport, such as this one in Miami can prove too tempting for crew members looking for quick but illegal entry to the United States.

As a means of illegal entry, the number of ship jumpers per year is actually quite small, probably only in the thousands. Fourteen million people entered the United States through seaports in FY’04, and almost 434 million entered through all ports combined. So while it may not be a large segment of what CBP calls non-immigrant visa overstays, jumping ship seems like a clever, attractive way to some individuals who figure they’d never be admitted otherwise.

But CBP has developed a layered approach to prevent these violators from entering the United States and staying.

Four layers of security

The first layer involves the visa itself. Before 9/11, ships used something called the “crew-first visa,” which was a single, blanket visa covering all crew members. But not anymore. Now, each crew member must obtain his or her own visa from the State Department, just as foreign tourists have to.

The second layer involves the vessel’s manifest. A list of everything on board—merchandise, food supplies, other cargo, and people—must be transmitted to the Coast Guard, our hand-in-glove partner in maritime border security, and to CBP, 96 hours before the ship arrives in port. This gives CBP ample opportunity to check crews against watch lists, run their names through the Advance Passenger Information System, or query other intelligence sources.

The third layer of security also involves the Coast Guard. If anything on the manifest, anything at all, piques CBP’s or the Coast Guard’s interest—if officers see anything about the vessel, its contents, or its crew that they believe indicates high risk—Coast Guard and CBP officers will both board the ship at sea for further investigation.

The fourth layer involves CBP’s inspection of the ship. CBP officers board every cargo and cruise ship arriving from abroad to determine the admissibility of everyone on board. And they communicate anyone or anything that appears to be high risk to the National Targeting Center, to other federal agencies that need to know—the FBI or Fish and Wildlife Service, for example—and in the most exigent situation, will contact the nearest law enforcement agency to cart someone off to jail.

Layer four also involves reinspection. As cruise or cargo ships move from one U.S. port to another to conduct business, CBP can reinspect the vessel at each new port of arrival. One reason for this is to assure that any crew member detained on board is, in fact, still on board.

Should a crew member be detained—forbidden to leave the ship—that detainment can be enforced in any of several ways: If the person has been detained for national security reasons, CBP and the Coast Guard, under the Coast Guard’s legal authority, will compel the ship’s captain, owner or operator to enact a viable security plan, which could include posting guards at gangways; lifting gangplanks while the ship is in port; forcing the vessel off the dock and farther out to sea, or maybe out of U.S. waters entirely.

If anything “good” can be said of 9/11, it would probably be about the international paradigm shift that has occurred regarding cargo, people, and border security. Thanks in part to programs like the Container Security Initiative, the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, the National Targeting Center, and other very well known, highly publicized U.S. initiatives, our maritime security programs have put fear in the hearts of ship operators. Ship owners and operators realize that today, the standards regarding cargo crew are exceedingly strict. Few ship operators if any are willing to pick up a dock worker as casually as they might have pre-9/11, because the potential hassle, fines or even worse, that could result from such a careless move are simply not worth it. CBP has the legal authority to deny shore leave to anyone who is not clearly and beyond any doubt entitled to it. And the good news is, they do.

There are two categories of ship jumpers: absconders, or crew members who do not have permission to leave the vessel at all while it’s in port, and deserters, who do have shore leave, that is, permission to leave the ship. Deserters are really no different than any other visitor with a non-immigrant visa who overstays that visa. Most crewmembers and the ship itself can stay in an American port up to 29 days.