Editorial: Porous border checkpoints

Congressional investigators say thousands of travelers who should not have been allowed to enter the United States nevertheless passed uncontested through U.S. Customs and Border Protection checkpoints last year.

A report released Monday by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, says agents for the border protection agency - created in 2003 to monitor checkpoints at the 326 air, sea and land ports of entry - routinely failed to stop pedestrians or inspect vehicles entering the United States.

The GAO cites examples of agents motioning pedestrians and vehicles through entry gates without even looking up from their computer monitors and agents failing to board recreational vehicles to see whether people were inside. Two GAO investigators were allowed to pass into the United States without showing documentation after an agent asked whether they were U.S. citizens and they answered "yes."

The agency is chronically understaffed, the GAO also reports, and agents who have worked double shifts routinely call in sick to avoid being called in for a third. Staffing levels were so low at seven of the eight ports the GAO visited that training sessions were canceled to cover basic operations. As a result, agents were reluctant to search travelers for drugs because they thought they lacked adequate training, the GAO reports.

Although the exact number of people who had been improperly admitted to the United States was withheld for security reasons, the GAO says it was "several thousand." This is a poor showing for an agency that is responsible for preventing improperly documented travelers - some of whom could be terrorists, drug dealers or other criminals - from entering our country.

It is widely known that the government lacks the resources and staffing to adequately secure the nation's borders in areas without checkpoints. That the nation's formal entry stations also are understaffed and poorly monitored tells us that the Bush administration doesn't truly understand the gravity of having such porous borders.

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