Chertoff to defy Congress with new border-crossing ID rules

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff Wednesday said new border-crossing requirements will go into effect at the end of the month, despite opposition from Congress and concerns from state officials that commerce and tourism will be disrupted. Chertoff said the department plans to begin phasing in new requirements under the so-called Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative.

"On Jan. 31 of this year, we'll be making some changes at the land border," Chertoff said in a speech to a border security advisory panel in Washington. The new rules will apply to travelers coming into the United States at land crossings from Canada and Mexico and by water from the Caribbean. Border inspectors will no longer accept oral declarations of citizenship, meaning U.S. citizens will have to present documentation proving they reside in the country, Chertoff said.

He said the department will also begin preparations to limit the types of documents that can be used to prove citizenship. Border inspectors now accept about 8,000 different documents, many in the form of birth certificates issued by a variety of jurisdictions.

Last year, Homeland Security began requiring people coming into the United States by air from Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean to present a passport or other government-approved identification document. Chertoff said compliance rates for the air rules have reached 99 percent. But he did not mention problems and delays that U.S. citizens had obtaining passports from the State Department last year, with delays so acute that Homeland Security had to delay implementation of the air rules for six months.

The passport trouble also drew the ire of lawmakers. Congress responded by recently passing legislation that prohibits the department from fully implementing the land crossing rules until June 2009.

"Congress has mandated a delay for the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative ... but [Homeland Security] will nevertheless, in the intervening time, take some reasonable and very important measures to eliminate what I consider to be unacceptable vulnerabilities at our land border," Chertoff said.

Chertoff said oral declarations will no longer be accepted "in all but extraordinary circumstances." But, due to the congressional restrictions, border inspectors "will still accept many of the documents that are currently available," Chertoff said. He added, "We are not implementing WHTI but we are certainly rationalizing the existing system." He said it would "shock, amaze and probably dismay a lot of Americans" that somebody can enter the country simply by saying they are a U.S. citizen.

"I have to say that nothing I've seen about the way the world is these days or the state of our illegal immigration leads me to believe that the honor system ... works well at the border," he said. The recently enacted fiscal 2008 omnibus spending bill gives Homeland Security funding to hire "several hundred" additional border inspectors to improve processing times, Chertoff added.