GAO Finds Real Holes in the Virtual Fence

GAO Finds Real Holes in the Virtual Fence

Ever since Congress and the Bush administration agreed to construct hundreds of miles of security fencing along our southern border, immigration enforcement opponents have worked diligently to ensure that it gets built as slowly as possible, if at all. Earlier this year, we reported about provisions in the 2008 Omnibus Appropriations bill that will hamper further construction. There has also been talk from some congressional leaders of substituting “virtual fencing” for the actual fencing called for in the 2006 legislation.

A new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reveals that virtual fencing may be virtually useless in our efforts to stop real illegal aliens and, potentially, real terrorists who attempt to enter our country. Moreover, the GAO concluded that $20.6 million spent to construct virtual fencing along the Arizona border has turned out to be an actual waste of taxpayer money. Because of problems with the first 28-mile segment, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced that completion of the first phase of the technological initiative to secure the border will be delayed from late 2008 until 2011.

The Boeing Corporation was contracted in 2006 to implement a series of nine security towers equipped with night vision cameras, radar and sensors, along with a variety of communications systems and software to monitor activities along large stretches of the border. The technology was supposed to have been in place by June 2007, but the software system failed to distribute the information gathered by the detection devices. In December, Boeing submitted plans to CBP that were supposed to fix these problems. CBP accepted these “fixes” and began training personnel on the system’s use on February 22, just five days before the GAO reported that the virtual fence did not work.

In response, the CBP conceded that they do not expect the virtual fence to substantially improve the Border Patrol’s ability to capture illegal border crossers. Rather — in the virtual reality that exists only inside the Beltway — the value of the failed project is expected to be a lesson learned. The GAO was a little more blunt about the lessons learned. The virtual fence “was never what [the Border Patrol] wanted, it never will be. They’re going to have to replace all the equipment,” Richard Stana, GAO’s director of Homeland Security and Justice Issues told Congress.

In his testimony before Congress in March, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued that the GAO’s conclusions about the virtual fence were overstated. Chertoff assured Congress and the public that Boeing would be absorbing the costs associated with the system’s defects.

FAIR has supported the use of technology that has been proven to work to help monitor activities in more remote areas of the border. However, we have long contended that technology should complement, not replace, actual fencing and manpower. Real fencing, where it is in place along our borders, has proven to be highly effective in controlling illegal entries. But even when technology works as it is supposed to, it is useless without adequate manpower and equipment to apprehend illegal border crossers when they are detected.