GSIS Principal David Aguilar discussed border technology and immigration reform with Tom Temin, host of Federal Drive on Federal News Radio and Amy Rall, Group Vice President of Homeland Security and Critical Infrastructure at Unisys.  A preview for the segment is featured below and the full segment can be found here.

Immigration Reform is not a new topic but, is expected to become one of the top priorities when President-elect Donald Trump takes office in 2017. While all of the aspects of this new focus on border security have not been clearly defined by our new President-elect, we can expect it to include elements of both physical security protections as well as advanced technology.

Technology solutions are already helping to verify that travelers are who they say they are when they present a passport or other travel documents at the nation’s 328 ports of entry. These solutions have prevented suspected terrorists from boarding U.S.-bound planes half a world away and also have been to apprehend individuals for illegally crossing U.S. borders.

At border crossings today, U.S. Border Patrol agents monitor the borders utilizing a software program that ties together government databases to enable them to gather biographic information about individuals, look for instances when they’ve previously crossed the border, and see whether they have any outstanding warrants. This is all accomplished by a combination of gate systems, mobile handheld devices and RFID technology which are able to more efficiently identify and process pedestrians crossing the U.S. Mexico border by collecting their biometric and biographic data well before they reach the border control office.

Published on Dec. 20, 2016 on the Federal News Radio website.