INS’ overall budget has more than doubled within 5 years, from $1.5 billion in fiscal year 1993 to $3.1 billion in fiscal year 1997. INS has spent about $2.3 billion on border enforcement from fiscal years 1994 through 1997. For fiscal year 1997, the combined budget for INS’ Border Patrol and Inspections programs—the two programs responsible for deterring illegal entry along the border—was nearly $800 million. INS, through other INS programs, provides additional support for the strategy by allocating funds for computer automation, technology procurement, and construction of barriers. INS’ Border Patrol is responsible for preventing and detecting illegal entry along the border between the nation’s ports of entry. The Border Patrol has 21 sectors, 9 of which are along the southwest border. The Border Patrol’s appropriations were $631 million for fiscal year 1997, a 69 percent increase over its $374 million expenditure for fiscal year 1994. As of July 21, 1997, the Border Patrol had about 6,500 agents nationwide. About 6,000, or 92 percent, were located in the nine sectors along the southwest border. In fiscal year 1996, the Border Patrol apprehended about 1.6 million aliens nationwide, of whom 1.5 million were apprehended in sectors along the southwest border. (Appendix III contains detailed staffing and selected workload data for the Border Patrol.) INS Inspections and the U.S. Customs Service share responsibility for inspecting all applicants for admission at the U.S. ports of entry. The purpose of their inspections is to prevent the entry of inadmissible applicants by detecting fraudulent documents, including those representing false claims to U.S. citizenship or permanent residence status, and seize conveyances used for illegal entry. Figure 2 depicts INS’ 36 land ports of entry along the southwest border. As of March 30, 1997, INS Inspections had about 1,300 inspectors at ports of entry along the southwest border. The Inspections’ appropriation was $151 million for fiscal year 1997, a 78 percent increase from its $85 million expenditure for fiscal year 1994. As of March 15, 1997, the U.S. Customs Service had about 7,400 inspectors nationwide. Of these 7,400 inspectors, 2,200, or 30 percent, were located along the southwest border to inspect individuals and cargo. In fiscal year 1996, INS and Customs inspectors along the southwest border inspected about 280 million people, including 84 million, or 30 percent, who were U.S. citizens. (App. III contains detailed staffing and selected workload data for INS Inspections.) Within the Department of Justice, the 94 offices of the U.S. Attorneys are responsible for prosecuting individuals charged with committing offenses under U.S. law, including persons who illegally enter the United States. Because the Justice Department determined that it does not have the resources necessary to prosecute all illegal entrants, the U.S. Attorneys located in districts along the southwest border have instituted a policy to focus criminal prosecutions on alien smugglers, and on those aliens without legal documentation who are linked directly to violence and crime in the community. The policy calls for imposing administrative, rather than criminal, sanctions on first-time violators who do not otherwise have criminal histories. In October 1995, the Attorney General appointed the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California as her Special Representative for Southwest Border Issues. This collateral responsibility includes coordinating the border law enforcement activities of various Justice Department agencies, including INS, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with the activities undertaken by the Departments of the Treasury and Defense. The Department of State also has a role in deterring illegal entry along the southwest border. Mexican nationals who seek to visit the United States can obtain a border-crossing card, a type of entry document, from either State Department consulates in Mexico or from INS at ports of entry. According to the State Department, insufficient staffing levels overseas, ineffective interagency cooperation over the exchange of data, and needed computer enhancements all contribute to a weakening of management controls in the visa issuance function. To determine what the Attorney General’s strategy to deter illegal entry called for, we reviewed and summarized information on border control strategies, plans, and directives contained in a variety of Justice Department and INS documents related to border control and, because the Attorney General had not published a specific strategy for the southwest border, we prepared a summary of these documents (see app. I). Not all of the documents used were specifically identified as “strategy” documents. Justice Department officials reviewed this summary in May 1997 and agreed that it accurately reflected the Attorney General’s strategy and its various components at that time. To determine what actions had been taken to implement the strategy along the southwest border and whether initial results expected from the strategy’s implementation have occurred, we conducted in-person interviews with officials from six of the nine Border Patrol sectors along the southwest border and telephone interviews with officials from the remaining three sectors. We interviewed INS officials from the five INS district offices responsible for all of the ports of entry along the southwest border, INS Inspections officials from seven ports of entry, and Customs officials from five ports of entry. In addition, we analyzed INS’ Border Patrol and Inspections workload and apprehension data, reviewed documents pertaining to INS’ management priorities, and reviewed INS intelligence reports and previous reports done by us and the Department of Justice’s Inspector General. We did not verify the validity of INS computer generated data related to workload and apprehension statistics. However, we discussed with INS officials their data validation efforts. These officials were confident that the data could be used to accurately portray trends over time. We met with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California, who is also the Attorney General’s Southwest Border Representative, to discuss aspects of the strategy related to prosecuting those that violate immigration laws. We also discussed with INS and State Department officials the status of various border control efforts to deter illegal entry mandated by the 1996 Act. In conjunction with one of these efforts—improvements in border-crossing identification cards—we visited State Department consulates in Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana, Mexico. To identify indicators that could be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the strategy in deterring illegal entry, we reviewed illegal immigration research studies and interviewed officials from INS and the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform. We also convened a meeting with a panel of immigration researchers to obtain their views on a range of evaluation issues, such as appropriate indicators of the strategy’s outcome, sources of relevant data in addition to INS, the reliability of existing data, and how data should be analyzed. We did our work between December 1996 and September 1997 in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. We requested comments on a draft of this report from the Attorney General, the INS Commissioner, the Acting Customs Commissioner, and the Secretary of State or their designees. On September 16, 1997, the INS Executive Associate Commissioner for Policy and Planning provided us with oral comments, which are discussed near the end of this letter. The Customs Service had no comments on our report and the Department of State provided technical corrections only. In February 1994, the Attorney General announced a five-part strategy to strengthen enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws. The strategy included strengthening the border, removing criminal aliens, reforming the asylum process, enforcing workplace immigration laws, and promoting citizenship for qualified immigrants. The strategy to strengthen the border called for “prevention through deterrence,” that is, to raise the risk of being apprehended for illegal aliens to a point where they would consider it futile to try to enter the United States illegally. The strategy was to involve concentrating new resources on the front lines at the most active points of illegal activity along the southwest border. To carry out the priority to strengthen the border, the Border Patrol was to, among other things, (1) concentrate personnel and technology resources in a four-phased approach, starting first with the sectors with the highest level of illegal immigration activity (as measured by apprehensions) and moving to the areas with the least activity; (2) make maximum use of physical barriers to deter entry along the border; (3) increase the proportion of time Border Patrol agents spent on border control activities; and (4) identify the appropriate quantity and mix of technology and personnel needed to control the border. Recognizing that increased enforcement by the Border Patrol might force some aliens to try to enter the United States illegally through the ports of entry, the strategy calls for INS’ Inspections program to increase the number of inspectors and the use of technology to both deter and detect illegal entry and improve management of legal traffic and commerce. For example, to deter illegal entry the strategy called for increasing the number of illegal aliens referred for prosecution and testing automated fingerprint technology to detect inadmissible aliens. To improve management of legal traffic, the strategy called for providing the public with more information so they would be better prepared for the inspection process. In concert with INS’ efforts to deter illegal entry, the strategy calls for increasing felony prosecutions of alien smugglers and those criminal aliens who have repeatedly reentered the United States after having been removed. In addition, the 1996 Act requires the Attorney General to take additional border control measures to deter illegal entry into the United States. Appendix II discusses the status of these efforts not discussed elsewhere in this report. INS has made progress in implementing the Attorney General’s strategy to deter illegal entry along the southwest border. In September 1997, Border Patrol officials told us that the Border Patrol had nearly completed phase I of the strategy, which called for allocating Border Patrol resources to the San Diego, California, and El Paso, Texas, sectors. They stated that the Border Patrol was now moving into phase II of the strategy, which called for increasing resources in the Tucson, Arizona, sector and three sectors in south Texas—Del Rio, Laredo, and McAllen.