Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Fact Sheet
Release Date: October 23, 2008
Each day at America's ports of entry U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers inspect more than 1.1 million travelers, including 340,000 vehicles and over 85,000 shipments of goods approved for entry; process more than 70,000 truck, rail and sea containers; collect more than $88 million in fees, duties, and tariffs; seize more than 5,500 pounds in illegal narcotics; and intercept more than 4,400 agricultural items and pests at ports of entry.
Securing the Border
- DHS has completed more than 216 miles of pedestrian fence and 154 miles of vehicle fence on the southwest border, for a total of approximately 370 miles.
- The Border Patrol now has more than 17,600 agents and by the end of this year we will have more than 18,300 agents. This doubles the size of the Border Patrol over the Fiscal Year (FY) 2001 level.
- We are using technology along the border in connection with tactical infrastructure, where Border Patrol deems necessary. Some technology currently used includes: unattended ground sensors, truck-mounted mobile surveillance systems, remote video surveillance systems, unmanned aerial systems, and fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft to detect, classify, track and respond to illegal border crossings.
- DHS saw a more than 17 percent reduction in apprehensions of illegal aliens at the southern border in FY 2008. This is an indication that there are fewer attempts to cross the border illegally.
Interior Enforcement
- In Fiscal Year 2007, U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested 3,563 gang members and their associates. This includes 1,489 criminal arrests.
- Under Operation Community Shield ICE has arrested more than 11,000 members and associates of approximately 890 different gangs. Of those apprehended so far in FY 2008, 1,654 have been charged criminally and 2,211 have been charged with immigration violations and processed for removal.
- The Secure Communities plan is not just about immigration enforcement – it's about improving public safety. As a part of Secure Communities, the ICE Criminal Alien Program (CAP) prioritizes and identifies removable criminal aliens based on their threat to the public safety and before they are released into the community.
- ICE has expanded its CAP to identify incarcerated criminal aliens. In Fiscal Year 2008, ICE identified for removal more than 221,000 criminals who were incarcerated in federal, state and local facilities.
- ICE established Fugitive Operations teams five years ago, and today they number over 100. ICE has eliminated more than 102,000 cases from the fugitive alien backlog in FY 2007 and over 95,000 cases in FY 2008. The net effect has been a nearly 12 percent reduction in the fugitive case backlog, over these two years (from 632,726 to 557,762 presently). Finally, Fugitive Operations Teams made nearly 34,000 arrests so far in 2008, exceeding the number of total arrests through this program in FY 2007.
- ICE continues to increase worksite enforcement operations. So Far in FY 2008, ICE made 1,101 criminal arrests and 5,173 administrative arrests.
- In Fiscal Year 2007, DHS obtained nearly $19 million in criminal fines, restitutions and civil judgments as a result of worksite enforcement.
e-Verify
- e-Verify is a free and simple to use Web-based system that electronically verifies the employment eligibility of newly hired employees -- visit www.dhs.gov/e-Verify.
- e-Verify works by allowing participating employers to electronically compare employee information taken from the Form I-9 (the paper based employee eligibility verification form used for all new hires) against more than 425 million records in the Social Security Administration's database and more than 60 million records in DHS immigration databases. About 96 percent of all cases queried through e-Verify are automatically verified to be employment authorized; those results are returned within seconds.
- Currently, more than 90,000 employers in every state and U.S. territory are enrolled in e-Verify and, on average, the program increases by about 1,000 new employers each week. Thus far in FY 2009, there have been more than 450,000 verification queries run through the system. More than 6.6 million queries were registered during FY 2008.
- DHS' FY 2009 appropriation legislation, signed into law on Sept. 30, 2008, provided $100 million to continue, expand and improve e-Verify in FY 2009.
No-Match Letter*
- DHS today issued a Supplemental Final Rule that provides additional background and analysis for DHS’s No-Match Rule. The DHS regulation, which was originally proposed in June 2006 and issued in August 2007, clarifies what steps responsible employers can take to resolve discrepancies identified in “no-match” letters issued by the Social Security Administration (SSA) and provides guidance to help businesses comply with legal requirements intended to reduce the illegal employment of unauthorized workers.
- The regulation sets forth clear guidance regarding the steps employers may take when they receive a “no match” letter and guarantees that ICE will consider employers who follow those steps to have acted reasonably. Under the rule, if an employer follows the safe harbor procedures in good faith, ICE will not use the employer’s receipt of a no-match letter as evidence to find that the employer knowingly employed unauthorized workers in violation of federal immigration law.
- The implementation of this regulation has been delayed due to lawsuits filed by the ACLU and U.S. Chamber of Commerce preventing DHS from granting this safe harbor.
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* Corrected No-Match section.
This page was last reviewed/modified on October 24, 2008.
