News Washington Bureau Chief
6/23/2002
WASHINGTON - The Immigration and Naturalization Service is moving to install exit checkpoints on the U.S. side of the Canadian border - a development Congress thought it had thwarted two years ago.
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and the new powers Congress gave Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who oversees the INS, have given the controversial program new life.
Tougher enforcement measures are planned than the first time around in the 1990s. With them, concerns over how they might impede tourism and commerce in the Buffalo Niagara region have returned.
A senior aide to Ashcroft recently told a meeting of Buffalo federal enforcement officials that "there will be no exceptions" to the INS rigors imposed on persons leaving the United States for Canada, according to Vincent "Jake" Lamb, manager of the Peace Bridge expansion project.
That means commuting Canadians will be required to show visas or other documents to federal agents every time they go home from the United States, Lamb said.
It was unclear whether Canadian commuters or tourists will have to submit to fingerprinting and biometric identification procedures, such as retinal scans, under the plans being crafted by Ashcroft and the INS.
In a June 6 news conference announcing his plans for exit checks, Ashcroft said all non-U.S. citizens will be subjected to the same procedures.
"Now that's just the people part of this thing," Lamb said. "When you start looking at the movement of goods going back and forth, that raises all kinds of issues that could adversely affect our economic relations with Canada."
Engineers and others associated with the Peace Bridge project, who spoke on condition they not be identified, said the exit-check initiative further complicates plans for the toll plaza on the U.S. side.
Plans will have to be adjusted, they said, to deal with the traffic backup along the Niagara Thruway, Buffalo's West Side and at other Niagara River bridges, as vehicles wait to go through the exit checks and the routine checks by Canadian customs.
Congressional sources said the INS and aides from the Justice Department told House and Senate staffers two weeks ago that the Bush administration can impose these without further congressional action.
The administration spokesmen said the Patriot Act that Congress passed after Sept. 11 empowers the president to order these exit checks.
"A lot of jaws dropped when we heard that," said a one congressional adviser.
The checkpoints will be installed first at 72 "critical border crossings," with installation planned for all points in the years and months ahead, Justice aides told the congressional staffers.
U.S. and Canadian enforcement agencies plan to assure bridge users that no major changes are expected at the Niagara River bridges any time soon, said Winston R. Barrus Jr., deputy director of the INS in Buffalo.
INS had hoped to have the hardware for the exit checks in place by the end of this year, with procedures to be developed later. That target has been moved back to the end of 2003, officials said.
Hard planning for the exit checks began at a meeting among enforcement agencies and bridge users here Feb. 20. James D. Phillips of Buffalo, head of the Can-Am Border Trade Alliance, attended the meeting. He was not immediately available to comment.
Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., chairman of the Judiciary Oversight Subcommittee, deferred comment.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said strengthened security measures at the border "must be done in a way that does not unduly burden law abiding citizens and businesses."
"Whatever happens," she said, "must be workable, sensible and effective."
Meanwhile, Canadian officials disputed a report carried by wire services that President Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien had planned to meet on border issues in Niagara Falls, Ont., this Friday but that the conference had to be postponed.
Jennifer Sloan, spokeswoman for John Manley, Canada's deputy prime minister, told The Buffalo News that a Bush-Chretien meeting this month "was never planned" and that "the location that was identified by the wire stories (Niagara Falls, Ont.) was never discussed."
What was planned, depending on progress in developing a border security program, she said, was a meeting between Manley and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge soon after a meeting of industrialized G-8 nations next week in Kananaskis, Alberta.
e-mail: dturner@buffnews.com