The photograph didn't look like much: two parallel rural roads, separated only by a small ditch.
But according to lawmakers in a hearing this week, it's a portrait of one of America's least-appreciated security risks. The ditch separates western Washington state and British Columbia, just one weak spot among many in the 4,000 mile stretch between the United States and Canada. Drug smugglers can chuck duffel bags stuffed with marijuana and meth, undetected. Human traffickers and potential terrorists could use it to avoid the security equipment at official crossings.
Sen. Cory Booker displayed the picture in a U.S.-Canadian border security hearing earlier this week to demonstrate just how undefended America's largest flank can be. The hearing was the fifth in a series looking at the challenges associated with so many entry points into the U.S. -- other recent sessions have focused on Central American migrant children and transnational criminal organizations.
The U.S-Canadian border, as Politico Magazine reportedlast fall, is often overlooked in the homeland security debate, even though it's the international crossing where custom and border agents have nabbed suspected terrorists over the last two decades with plans to set off bombs from Los Angeles to New York.
As far as political attention goes, the Canadian border has an image problem, one that Booker and some of his Senate colleagues were trying to solve this week. It isn't plagued by the hot-button issues of migrant children, day laborers and violent drug smugglers to the south, so it's hard to focus public attention on the risks that do exist.
"It's kind of the forgotten border," Sen. Heidi Heitkamp said in an interview as she rushed from the committee hearing to the Senate floor to vote on an amendment to a human trafficking bill.
The North Dakota Democrat is one of the most vocal in trying to get the border issue more attention. She gave a recent tour of the remote northern U.S. border to a senior Homeland Security official and last year Sen. Tom Carper, the Delaware Democrat who at the time was chairing the committee, visited the area.
During the Senate's 2013 immigration reform debate, Heitkamp drafted two amendments aimed at trying to fix some of the border problems: One was designed to help speed up commercial goods flowing between the two countries by allowing border patrol agents to work more closely together; the other tried to ensure the U.S.-Canadian border didn't get sapped of resources -- financial and manpower -- in the rush to shore up the Mexican border. Neither amendment got a vote.
"It's extraordinarily difficult in this climate to try and convince people that we're all one border," Heitkamp lamented. "It's like anywhere you have a leak you have a potential breach."
Part of the challenge is just keeping her fellow lawmakers' attention. Congressional hearings are renowned for members veering off the specified topic at hand, and the Canadian border hearing was no exception. On Wednesday, it was Sen. John McCain who seized control of the agenda. When the Arizona Republican's turn to question the witnesses came up, he asked why Interior Department officials had apparently nixed a DHS request to install detection equipment on federal lands along the U.S.-Mexican border ("I don't know if that's true," Border Patrol Chief Michael Fisher replied) and whether the flow of unaccompanied children trying to get into the U.S. this year would be as high as last year (It wouldn't, Fisher answered).
Asked as he left the hearing if he was concerned about security issues at the Canadian border too, McCain replied, "Some. But, you know, it's still, the major problem is on our southern border."
Sen. Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican and new chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, told POLITICO that he still had "an awful lot of unanswered questions" about the challenges on the northern border. But just by metrics alone, he said most of the focus was rightly to the south, where apprehensions of illegal immigrants is much higher - 480,000, compared with 3,000 -- and where drug smuggling is also far more rampant.
"What's coming through the northern border pales in comparison to what's coming through the southern border," Johnson said.
Congress is still searching for solutions for shoring up the northern border -- no easy feat in a budget-strapped environment where across-the-board sequestration spending cuts remain in effect. Heitkamp said she wants DHS to focus on keeping border agents on staff in remote areas where job retention can be difficult. Nebraska GOP Sen. Ben Sasse said he'd be pressing Homeland Security officials to answer for outsideaudits by the Government Accountability Office that have questioned whether their radiation detection equipment was up to snuff.
"I, for one, am not calling for any fence," Booker said while presenting his visual aid to the committee. "But also what I'm really looking for is a proportionate focus on our northern border threats."
Scotty Greenwood, a senior adviser to the Canadian-American Business Council, said she's not surprised Mexico keeps getting the bulk of the limelight on U.S. border security matters. The same thing happens frequently whenever there are trilateral talks among the North American allies.
But she said there's good reason for the focus on the south. Cooperation between Washington and Ottawa over border security are largely in a good place, a dispute over U.S. access to Canada's no-fly list notwithstanding (DHS officials explained during the Senate hearing that they don't know why they don't get access to that information, and then punting lawmakers' questions to the FBI, which manages the list).
"The story on Northern border law enforcement security is largely a good one that tends to not be dramatic. Not a lot of fireworks," Greenwood said. "The political theater isn't as intense when you're talking about what a good job we do."
Maybe that's why there was so little media interest in this week's Senate affair. C-SPAN may have had two cameras at the hearing. But the only signatures on the committee's press sign-in sheet, besides POLITICO, came from a Hearst reporter who left during the first round of questioning and legislative liaisons for the Justice Department and Army.
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