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U.S. Customs Service Procedures

Aired November 22, 2001 - 07:39   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JEANNE MESERVE, CNN ANCHOR: One of the best ways to make a country secure is to make its borders secure, but that could be a huge task when you're talking about a country the size of the U.S. There are 301 ports of entry into the country, a number that's a bit deceiving because a port of entry can be an airport, a seaport, one or more land crossings or any combination of the three. And how busy are those ports of entry? Some of them are extraordinarily so when you consider that about 490 million people cross into the U.S. each year.

Let's just look at one corner of the country, Southern California. Ninety-four million people cross into Southern California each year by land at one of six border crossings. More than 110,000 travel in by plane to San Diego's airport and the seaport welcomes another 114,000 plus.

Responsibility for screening those people falls to two agencies, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Customs Service.

Joining me right now, Robert Bonner, the U.S. Customs Commissioner.

What is the procedure for coming into the country and how is it different today then it was before September 11?

ROBERT C. BONNER, U.S. CUSTOMS COMMISSIONER: Well, first of all, on September the 11th the U.S. Customs Service, with INS, went to what's called Level One Alert (ph) which is the highest level of security alert short of actually shutting down our borders. And it means, among other things, it means asking more questions of more people more often. It means looking in more vehicles coming across the border, the trunks and other areas of the vehicles. It means searching more luggage, hand-carried luggage coming in through the international airports where Customs also works as part of the effort to screen people coming in, to the end of doing everything we can responsibly to keep terrorists and implements of terrorists from coming into the United States.

MESERVE: Now when you're looking at people, how do you determine whether someone is a potential threat or not?

BONNER: Well, first of all, one of the things that's very important is that you have trained Customs officers or inspectors who are capable of detecting things that just seem a little bit out of the ordinary, something abnormal about a particular person or a situation. You know one of the best examples of that was the Customs inspector in the state of Washington, I think this was in December of 1999, who questioned a person who turned out to be Amad Rassam (ph). And Rassam was an al Qaeda terrorist who was attempting to enter the United States from Canada through the state of Washington at Port Angeles. She questioned this person. He seemed a little bit out of the ordinary. That led to a search of the trunk of his car where he had explosives, enough explosives to blow up L.A. International Airport. So that's one of the things, one of the...

MESERVE: Now records, too, I presume, are also examined?

BONNER: The...

MESERVE: Paperwork.

BONNER: Yes, paperwork is examined.

One of the other things that's important to this is to try to develop sophisticated targeting and risk assessment so that we're not questioning or searching the luggage of every single passenger that's coming in on an international flight, but we're -- we are, for example, getting what's called advanced passenger information about people coming in. That's provided to the U.S. Customs Service. And we use that to better identify and target the people that may be potential terrorists, to do what, to question them more closely, to perform searches of their luggage and their carry-ons, if necessary, to stop them if they're coming across in passenger vehicles across the land border where U.S. Customs officers are also engaged in this process. So it's very important to have that advance information.

And you might -- I might tell you that we just made that mandatory now through some legislation that Congress enacted as part of the airport security package to require that all airlines flying into the U.S. provide advanced passenger information to the U.S. Customs Service.

MESERVE: Now this is what happens if you're coming in through a designated port of entry. What if you're up in Canada and you hop on a snowmobile and just come over the border? You can do it, can't you?

BONNER: Yes. Well you can do it, but here in terms of looking at the issue of increasing the security, let's say at the northern border or the border with Canada which is very important because there is certainly a threat posed at that border, perhaps the most serious threat, it's important to keep in mind what are the risk factors. And you know that means, first of all, we have to do something at the port of entries which are 128 crossings -- official crossings that come from Canada into the U.S. and vise versa. We have to do something more effective to securing that and that's why on September the 11th, 10:00 a.m., the U.S. Customs Service went to Level One Alert which meant what -- we were going to -- we have inspectors 24 hours a day, two of them, at each border crossing.

MESERVE: But even now...

BONNER: Yes. MESERVE: ... do you have enough resources to do the job effectively?

BONNER: Well there's some issues in terms of having enough inspectors. Right now I can tell you that the U.S. Customs Service officers at the -- at the border points of entry, the land border with Canada, for example, we've had to temporarily assign additional inspectors to the border.

But we also are working enormous amounts of overtime, far more than normal. We have Customs officers that have been working 12 to 16 hours a day, in some cases, 7 days a week, since September the 11th. So we're -- there's no question that the U.S. Customs Service has really turned to and is responding to the terrorist threat.

But I am concerned that -- of burnout. I'm concerned that, you know, after a while you simply have to augment these resources in one way or another. One of the things I'm doing is to bring in some additional National Guard to provide some assistance to Customs inspectors, particularly at the northern border, to help us so that we're -- we have some temporary support. And then -- and then we're going to be able to, I hope, add and train new Customs inspectors to be deployed at the border.

MESERVE: Robert Bonner, U.S. Customs Commissioner, thank you.

BONNER: You bet.

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