Perspective: Border intelligenceBorder Agents Can Now Get Classified Intelligence Information. Experts Call That Dangerous.
Pushing further toward its goal of “extreme vetting,” the Trump administration is creating a new center in suburban Virginia that will allow immigration agents to access, for the first time, the sprawling array of information scooped up by America’s intelligence agencies, from phone calls intercepted by the National Security Agency to material gathered by the CIA’s spies overseas to tips from informants in Central America. “Legal experts worry that immigration agents could potentially use this secret data to flag entire categories of people that fit ‘suspect’ profiles and potentially bar them from entering the U.S., or prompt them to be tracked while they’re here,” Melissa Del Bosque writes. “It could also be nearly impossible for those denied entry to challenge faulty information if wrongly accused, they say, since most of it is classified.”
Pushing further toward its goal of “extreme vetting,” the Trump administration is creating a new center in suburban Virginia that will allow immigration agents to access, for the first time, the sprawling array of information scooped up by America’s intelligence agencies, from phone calls intercepted by the National Security Agency to material gathered by the CIA’s spies overseas to tips from informants in Central America.
Melissa Del Bosque writes in Defense One that this classified, potentially derogatory, information will eventually be used to screen everyone seeking to enter the United States, including foreign vacationers seeking travel visas, people applying for permanent residency or immigrants requesting asylum at the Mexican border.
“Legal experts worry that immigration agents could potentially use this secret data to flag entire categories of people that fit ‘suspect’ profiles and potentially bar them from entering the U.S., or prompt them to be tracked while they’re here,” she writes. “It could also be nearly impossible for those denied entry to challenge faulty information if wrongly accused, they say, since most of it is classified.”
In an interview with Del Bosque, the director of the new National Vetting Center, which is being overseen by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, was vague about the types of classified information that may be shared with immigration agencies but said the vetting center’s privacy and legal experts will make sure it conforms with the law.
Del Bosque writes:
Brian Katz, a former CIA analyst and now a fellow with the foreign policy think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, said some members of the intelligence community are wary of DHS overseeing such a program because the agency is largely run by political appointees, who can be influenced by whatever agenda is being pushed by the president. “I think that’s particularly acute in this administration given the policies that DHS leadership has either been advocating or executing,” he said.
Chinmayi Sharma, a former software developer who worked on government contracts and is now a lawyer specializing in technology and privacy, said what Trump is doing — through a series of presidential directives — is rapidly transforming immigration enforcement from a largely human interaction to computer analytics-based enforcement. Sharma wrote about the National Vetting Center and technology’s impact on enforcement for the national security blog Lawfare.
Ultimately, she said, the vetting center could usurp much of Congress’ oversight over immigration. Based on information from the center, immigration agents and consular officials could unilaterally grant or deny entry to the United States, perhaps excluding groups of people without having to account for their reasoning. “A lot of the president’s executive orders talk about ‘risky populations’ that aren’t even necessarily country related,” Sharma said. “Is it age group, is it religion, is it someone who identifies a certain way politically?”
