For those who are unfamiliar with CBP, our mission is to prevent terrorists and their weapons from entering the United States, while facilitating the flow of legitimate trade and travel. Last year, we welcomed 431.3 million legitimate travelers to these shores.

The agency is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Officially launched on March 1, 2003, CBP unifies the efforts of four formerly separate agencies: U.S. Border Patrol, U.S. Customs Service, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

As the nation’s unified border agency, CBP is responsible for protecting more than 5,000 miles of border with Canada; 1,900 miles of border with Mexico; and 95,000 miles of shoreline. It manages 324 official ports of entry in addition to 20 sectors with 33 border checkpoints along the perimeter of the nation’s borders.

Outside the nation’s official ports of entry, CBP aims to gain control of the border. Control requires that four key conditions be met. These are:

• Detect illegal entries when they occur;
• Identify what the entry is and classify its level of threat;
• Effectively and efficiently respond to the entry, and;
• Bring the situation to the appropriate law enforcement resolution.

Border control is achieved, in a given area, when we are able to consistently meet all four of the above elements in that area.

CBP is guided in this effort by DHS’s Secure Border Initiative (SBI), a strategy to gain control of our borders. We can’t hermetically seal 6,000 miles and keep out 100 percent of illegal crossers. But we can create such a high likelihood of interdiction that it will have a strong and unequivocal deterrent effect on those who wish to cross illegally.

This broad multi-year initiative looks at all aspects of the problem across the board – deterrence, detection, apprehension, detention, and removal. SBI addresses these challenges with an integrated mix of increase in frontline personnel, more robust interior enforcement, greater investment in detection technology and infrastructure, and enhanced coordination on federal, state, local, and international levels.

Accomplishing this vision will take tremendous partnership with state, local, tribal governments; our partners across the federal government, our international partners, and private sector.

	Photo Credit: Gerald L. Nino

A critical component of the SBI strategy is the Department’s plan to launch a comprehensive program to transform its border control technology and infrastructure. This program, named SBInet, will integrate multiple state-of-the-art systems and traditional security infrastructure into a single comprehensive border protection system for the department.

The DHS goal is to award a solutions based integrator contract by the end of this fiscal year. We expect the private sector systems integrator to help DHS and CBP provide a solution that does four things.

First, it must fully integrate and balance the tradeoffs of personnel, technology and infrastructure requirements.

Second, it must address the need to coordinate operations and share information among all relevant DHS agencies and other federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement, defense, legal and intelligence agencies.

Third, it must evaluate the illegal entry threat against the current level of resources, prioritize the shortfalls based on areas of greatest operational need, and provide a comprehensive road-map for achieving full operational control of the border in the shortest possible time.

Finally, it must include a detailed and comprehensive set of performance measures to ensure we have a robust ability to view and understand the impact of adding resources to ensure the expected improvements in operational capabilities actually are occurring.

By combining existing investments and current security infrastructure with state-of-the-art technologies, best practices, and creative thinking, SBInet will provide the blueprint for integrating critical border security components in order to protect the United States borders. Through the right combination of personnel, infrastructure, technology and rapid response capability, SBInet will give our frontline the best possible environment to effectively detect, identify and classify, respond to, and resolve illegal migration situations with the appropriate law enforcement.