Homeland Security Show | Episode 11

Barely anyone in the United States bothers to talk about the northern border with Canada. Why? It is basically tranquil. While I blogged about 330 illegal aliens over a 12 mile stretch of Arizona in one night a few weeks ago, Canada’s twice as long border with the U.S. gets about 1,700 apprehensions a year. So we needn’t pay attention to the northern border, right? Wrong.

The extensive cooperation between the U.S. and Canada should be providing us extensive lessons learned and best practices to take to the southern border. Not all is transferable considering the polar opposite state of affairs in the two countries– Mexico remains out of control with horrific violence, while Canada pursues what may seem relatively minor offenses to us with vigor– firearm sales by a single supplier or tobacco contraband. However, the level of border intelligence shared and joint management of investigations and prosecutions of border-related crime, and potentially national security cases revolving on terrorism, make Canada’s Integrated Border Enforcement Teams worthy of a closer look by Americans. We do not approach our southern border as an integrated whole for intelligence or investigative purposes, nor for apprehensions, and that the coordination on the northern border– even if only amongst U.S. personnel– is worthy of consideration for the U.S. southern border.

Recently, improvements have been made in the cooperation between the U.S. and Canada, and in one of my most articulate and interesting interviews to date, Superintendent Warren Coons of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Director of 24 Integrated Border Enforcement Teams (IBETs) that span the entire US/Canadian border, describes his bird’s eye view of the U.S./Canada border and the current and future cooperation between the two nations. If nothing else, while it may never be possible to 100 percent secure any border, listening to how interdictions of criminal movement across our physical borders and between our ports of entry work can work successfully is essential to anyone who really wants to understand what ‘border security’ can mean.

A couple of highlights from the Homeland Security Roundup:

• On Capitol Hill, the House finally makes a statement on immigration policy for the first time all session after failing to get the E-Verify worker authorization bill through last year. A number of House representatives successfully added amendments to the DHS appropriations bill by over a 50 vote margin that refuse to fund Assistant Secretary for Immigration and Custom Enforcement John Morton’s “prosecutorial discretion” memos.

• An update on al Shabaab in Somalia. Due to the continued threats against western targets in nearby Kenya (high buildings specifically threatened), including one attack in a retail mall in Nairobi a couple weeks ago injuring a few dozen, the US last week issued a $7 million reward for information to locate the founder of al-Shabaab, who announced his alliance with al Qaeda earlier this year. Rewards go as high as $25 million for information on al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.