NEW YORK — Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told The Post Tuesday that his department is rolling out biometric checks — including facial scans — after finding about half of people with a criminal record lie to border agents about their rap sheets.
Mullin was responding to a House intelligence committee report that raised alarms over the fact that a recommendation to do so — contained in the 9/11 Commission’s 2004 report — had not been adopted as the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks approaches.
“We are trying to get biometrics out there as fast as we can,” Mullin said during a visit to New York City to tout DHS’s “Operation Rotten Apple,” which quietly arrested 2,200 illegal migrants, including convicted murderers, rapists and drug traffickers, in New York state over the past month.
“Keep in mind, I’d say close to 50% of the individuals that say they don’t have any type of criminal record and we do biometrics on them, we find individuals like this individual that had rape charges from Germany. Because they come here and they give false names,” Mullin said.
“Under the Biden Administration they didn’t do any of these checks. They didn’t check to see if the person is really who they said they were. They just wrote down whatever name they gave them. And paroled them into the station at a pace of I think roughly 96% of the individuals who came across our country and are in our country illegally under the Biden administration.
“When we do biometrics we find all kinds of stuff.”
The intelligence committee called for the adoption of border patrol booths that check the biometrics — such as the faces, irises and fingerprints — of foreign citizens, pointing to the equipment at checkpoints for Europe’s Schengen Area as a model.
US land borders are particularly insecure in terms of scanning the faces of people entering from Canada or Mexico, the panel said.
Although passengers arriving by air now have their faces scanned upon entry, airports do not currently scan all outbound passengers’ faces, making it more difficult to verify that someone left the country.
Citizens of 42 countries can enter the US without a visa under the Visa Waiver Program, but are supposed to disclose their criminal histories before entering.
More than two decades ago, the 9/11 Commission called for authorities to “quickly complete a biometric entry-exit screening system” after reviewing evidence that at least two — and possibly eight — of the 19 jihadist hijackers had phony or manipulated passports.
Mullin said the rollout was hampered by a 76-day funding lapse for the department this year, which followed a 43-day partial government shutdown late last year.
“Keep in mind we were still shut down 76 straight days and we were shut down four times in a year. That’s hard to roll out what we want,” the DHS secretary said.
“But we got a great relationship obviously with our committees in the Senate and the House that have oversight over us. They want to see it out there. We want to see it out there.”
