GAO report questions feds’ plan for Arizona border technology

Friday, Nov. 4
By Uriel J. Garcia
Cronkite News

WASHINGTON – U.S. Customs and Border Protection needs to do a better job of justifying its plans for $1.5 billion border surveillance project at the Arizona-Mexico border, according to a government report released Friday.

The Government Accountability Office said immigration officials should further analyze the Arizona Border Surveillance Technology plan to justify the cost of the program, which is supposed to replace the now-abandoned Strategic Border Initiative, or SBInet.

The report said that without a full analysis of the new program and more accurate estimates of the costs, the plan might fail in its objective to secure the border.

“Without documentation of the analysis, there is no way to verify the process CBP (Customs and Border Protection) followed, identify how the underlying analyses were used, assess the validity of the decisions made, or justify the funding requested for the plan,â€