Critics: Trusted Traveler will allow Mexican cartels to bypass airport security

entry process at an automatic kiosk. The kiosks are currently available in twenty major U.S. airports.

Fox News notes that Mexican citizens applying for trusted traveler status will pay a $100 application fee and undergo thorough vetting by both U.S. and Mexican authorities.

If approved for the 5-year membership, their biometric and other information will be entered into a database that is rechecked every 24 hours, the DHS spokeswoman said.

Mexican citizens are already eligible for expedited land border crossings through another trusted traveler program, Secure Electronic Network for Travelers Rapid Inspection (SENTRI). DHS officials admit, though, that system is not flawless.

Last week, two SENTRI trusted travelers were caught trying to bring contraband across the border into the U.S. through the SENTRI-only express border passage (“Mexico cannot control border: WikiLeaks documents,” 17 December 2010 HSNW).

“The program in El Paso has been around since the late ’90s,” said CBP spokesman Roger Maier. “The program was designed to expedite entry for low-risk, high-frequency travelers. Occasionally someone will look at this as a chance to smuggle. Occasionally you will have someone who tries to press their luck.”

Maier noted that the two trusted travelers were caught because they still remain under scrutiny. “We do trust, but we will verify,” he said.

Dever says, however, that the arrests show that drug cartels could try to recruit people with clean backgrounds to be accepted into the program. “It’s a sinister business,” he said. “It’s calculated and well planned and they could develop these people early. This is a very sophisticated, very thought-out, forward-looking business — drug smuggling, people smuggling, it’s a huge enterprise. They’re not successful by guessing. They’re successful by planning and organization, and part of that is recruitment of operatives to infiltrate.”

Dever also criticized Napolitano’s launching of the program at a time of ever-escalating violence along the border.

“There’s obviously concern about abuse of anything like this,” said John Mill Ackerman, editor-in-chief of the Mexican Law Review and a professor of constitutional law at the Institute for Legal Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “There’s always the risk of people using legal status to commit crimes, and that’s why we have oversight. ”

He said critics of the policy have an unrealistic understanding of the border issue. “People imagine it’s just destitute peasants trying to run across to get work and tourists trying to go south and that somehow you can check everyone coming across the border, but this isn’t possible,” he said.

Geoff Freeman, senior vice president of the U.S. Travel Association, which has been an advocate of trusted traveler programs, told Fox News that the program will benefit both travelers and security officials. He said the Mexican Global Entry program will benefit frequent business travelers who, like other international visitors, boost the U.S. economy.

“We do need their business, we do need to create jobs. We are in a worldwide competition to attract travelers, their dollars, their minds, and right now we are not thriving in that competition; we’re drifting backwards,” Freeman said. “We need to be asking two questions: It’s not just, ‘How do we keep the cartel out?’ The second part of the question is, ‘How do we keep those people in who don’t wish to do us harm?’ ”

“Want to win hearts and minds, get visitors here. Or we can throw the baby out with the bath water if two get arrested.”

Stewart Verdery, who helped develop the Global Entry program as an assistant secretary under former DHS secretary Tom Ridge and is now a founder and partner at Monument Policy Group, a consulting group, said the new air trusted traveler program could make the tremendous volume of travelers from Mexico more manageable while freeing up resources. “There is always going to be some minute chance that someone’s going to get through,” Verdery said, noting that he has trusted traveler status through the Global Entry program. (His vetting took three weeks.)

Dever said the program would also be more palatable if U.S. citizens traveling domestically could participate in this kind of program, too. “We should probably do this domestically before we extend the olive branch to a foreign country,” he said. “Maybe there’s some way I can get into this program so I don’t have to get manhandled by TSA,” he said.