1 March 2004

 

  Buffalo Report home page
 

 

Bruce Jackson

Homeland Security to Senator Charles Schumer: 'Screw Buffalo'



Writing off New York State

The Peace Bridge expansion project is in huge trouble. Perhaps it is beyond repair. The perp is the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a top agency of the Federal government, so there is no place to go for help. Indeed, the people we’d go to for help are the people doing us the injury.

For about a year now Senator Charles Schumer has been trying to get the Department of Homeland Security’s Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to provide the U.S. Senate a clear statement of its position on shared border management for the Peace Bridge.

“Shared border management” means viewing the two sides of the border as a single zone, and putting such physical facilities as offices, toll booths, customs and other inspection facilities where there is the most space for them and where they will do the least amount of environmental damage. On its face, it is a no-brainer. But then politics and politicians get involved, and it all turns into mud.

For most of the summer and fall, Homeland Security stonewalled Schumer. He asked and asked again for a report, and they did nothing at all. At the public event in Fort Erie last month celebrating selection of a design for the new Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority offices and toll booths in Fort Erie, Schumer said that he had taken to calling Customs every week, hoping to move them to action. He would not stop, he said, until he got an answer. Shared border management, he said, was key to the whole Peace Bridge expansion process because only shared border management would return to Buffalo Fort Porter and Frederick Law Olmsted’s Front Park, significantly reduce air pollution in the area around the current Peace Bridge Plaza, and permit development of an international gateway appropriate to the crossing’s economic and political significance.

Answering Schumer

Schumer got his answer last week in the form of a seven-page undated and unsigned report (there was perhaps cover letter I didn’t see in which someone took responsibility for it) titled “A Report by the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Regarding a Potential Shared U.S.-Canadian Border Inspection Facility At Fort Erie, Ontario.”

There’s a lot of formal phrasing and make-nice writing in the report, but the bottom line, as far as Buffalo is concerned is: We don’t care, you don’t matter, screw you.

The Buffalo News reported that Senator Schumer said the report “moves the process forward.” I assume that was him putting as good a face as possible on a Bush administration policy decision that is insulting to him, to New York, and disastrous for the Peace Bridge expansion project.

George W. Bush didn’t carry New York in 2000 time and is unlikely to carry it in 2004. Washington, D.C. these days is an armed camp, with concrete barriers, barbed wire, and military personnel and weapons everywhere. The Bureau of Customs and Border Protection report reflects both attitudes: it shows no concern for the needs or interests of New York and it is grounded in grim paranoia about the world at large.

If the conditions set forth in the CBP report are allowed to stand, Buffalo will not be able to reclaim Front Park and Fort Porter, even if a shared border management plan is accepted by American and Canadian border control agencies and the governments of both countries draft and ratify the treaty that would be necessary to make it happen.

People involved in the process these past several years have said that the last and most difficult hurdle would be getting the necessary treaty through the Canadian and American governments. Senator Schumer told me a few weeks ago that he thought if things got to the treaty-making stage there would be no difficulty at all passing it. The problem, he said, was getting US Customs officials to say what it wanted.

Now they have said what they want. Assuming the CBP report reflects current Administration policy (there is no reason to think it does not), it seems evident that there is no interest in the White House or State Department make shared border management a reality. The CBP report is a bullet in the heart for all the Peace Bridge area rehabilitation efforts that have gone on in Buffalo for the past five years.

Managing the border

Several agencies on both sides of the border have an interest in who and what comes and goes. On this side, Customs, Immigration, and Agriculture all maintain a constant active presence at the Peace Bridge crossing, and the FBI and other federal agencies are involved as well.

There are three ways of handling the inspection operations:

—Incoming inspections: what we have now. Vehicles entering the country cross the Peace Bridge and are detained in a controlled zone within the United States while the clearing and inspection process goes on. Ditto, mutatis mutandis, on the Canadian side.

—Shared border management: all the inspection facilities of both countries are combined in the single location that makes the most logistical sense, thereby achieving economies of scale and space. In the case of the Peace Bridge, SBM would shift all the services to the Canadian side, where there is a great deal more room and less population.

—Reverse inspections: each country has its incoming inspection zone in the other country, so all processing takes place before vehicles and individual cross the border.

Reverse inspections take the most space of the three options, since they require not only a full inspection facility in each country but also large secondary facilities in each country to deal with every problematical vehicle or individual found on the other side. In the case of Buffalo and the Peace Bridge, reverse inspection would require the acquisition of more land on Buffalo’s West Side and there would be no relinquishment of plaza territory other than what the Public Bridge Authority is currently setting free by shifting the toll booths and its offices to the Canadian side.

Reverse inspection—the model that consumes the most land in Buffalo and hits the city with the most air contamination—is the model preferred by the Department of Homeland Security’s Bureau of Customs and Border Protection.

The report

The report begins with a sentence that at first glance says exactly what the report is not: “This report will detail how a shared U.S.-Canadian border inspection facility could be established on the Canadian side of the Peace Bridge in Fort Erie, Ontario.”

Verbs matter. The sentence doesn’t say “can be established.” Rather it’s the conditional “could.” The impediment, the thing keeping that “could” from being a “can” is the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection itself.

For what we call “shared border management” and CBP calls “shared facility/integrated order inspection area,” CBP requires that U.S. agents have on Canadian soil “border search authority, arrest authority, immunity under federal law, and the ability to carry firearms.” They would also require that “people taken into custody by U.S. personnel would be transferred to the U.S. for proescution without resort to extradition.”

This is perhaps the key paragraph in the CBP report:

It is important to note that under any model whereby U.S. personnel would operate on Canadian soil, they must do so with full legal authority in order for the U.S. to maintain or improve our homeland security efforts. Without full legal authority, CBP would not be able to replicate the inspection and enforcement activities it engages in today in the U.S. — the activities that prevent terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the U.S. — because CBP personnel would not have border search and arrest authority. They would also lack the ability, at their sole discretion (but consistent with U.S. law) to detain and question individual that they beieved posed a risk to the U.S. (e.g., subjects of terrorist watchlist records) and, indeed, could be undermined in their efforts to do so by the need to comply with criminal procedures in Canada that are far more restrictive than what is required under U.S. law. Moreover, given the threats face by CBP inspectors in the land border environment (e.g., terrorists, violent criminals, and port runners) and their need to be able to detain and arrest people for violations of U.S. law, it would not be appropriate to have them performing their duties without firearms. Thus, without full legal authority, CBP would be able to fully inspect suspicious shipments, conveyances, and people— a restriction that would be inconsistent with CBP’s critical homeland security mission.

This needs translation. Canada does not permit arrest and incarceration of citizens without legal representation or charge, as the U.S. now does. Canada is extremely reluctant to give U.S. police authority to shoot people with freedom from liability. Canada was recently faulted in a U.S. government study as a country hospitable to terrorists because it pays too much respect to civil liberties.

Later, the CBP report says that if U.S. agents had all the authority the CBP wants in Canada there would still be problems with having the full facility in Fort Erie:

That said, the creation of the IBIA would not fully address one critical security need — the protection of critical infrastructure — the Peace Bridge. That need could not be addressed without pursuing the concept of reverse inspections.

And, a little further on,

The only way to address these issues (i.e., fully protect the Peace Bridge without impeding trade and travel) would be to implement a reverse inspections regime. Under such a regime, U.S. personnel would relocate to Fort Erie and Canadian personnel would be located on the Buffalo side of the Peace Bridge for purposes of performing their inbound screening. [emphasis added]

Which is to say, all other issues become hostage to the bridge itself. Even though there are several other international bridges in the Buffalo-Niagara region, so an incident on the Peace Bridge would be at most a distraction in the ordinary passage of trade goods, everything in this Federal government document settles on protection of the physical facility. This is clarified in the report’s Conclusion:

A combined U.S.-Canadian shared facility at Fort Erie would need to include all CBP operations, and CBP personnel would need to operate with full legal authority. If designed an implemented in this manner, such a facility would offer some advantages to the United States from a security perspective. The concept of reverse inspections, however, would be necessary in order to maximize these advantages. [emphasis added]

That means it would be necessary to have, in addition to the combined inspection operation, a second inspection operation with Canadian facilities here and American facilities there. That not only carries the same problems with firearms, arrest power, deportation without a hearing, but requires large commitments of land on both sides. On the Buffalo side, the only place that land could come from would be properties now used for homes and business, plus the current Peace Bridge Plaza. The first choice would take a large number of properties off of Buffalo’s tax rolls; the second would kill any chance of resurrecting the two parks destroyed by Peace Bridge expansion in prior years.

What Homeland Security really wants

The Department of Homeland Security really wants reverse customs inspection, for which the legislation on this side of the border was signed into law by President Bush on January 20, 2003. Shared border management would help Buffalo, but neither Homeland Security nor CBP has thus far evinced any interest in helping Buffalo or the Niagara Frontier region. A careful reading of their document indicates that they will accept shared border management—but only if it is accompanied by reverse border management as well. If we have reverse border management, what’s the point of shared border management, since it will be totally redundant?

According to their plan, if any part of the parkland that the Public Bridge Authority took from us over the years is reclaimed, a huge truck and car inspection operation will be constructed to the north of it. And whether or not that land is reclaimed, a huge truck and car inspection operation will be constructed at this end of the bridge.

What the future will bring

Will this change if the Bush administration is bounced in November? Don’t count on it. New York’s infamous Rockefeller Drug Laws were enacted for mere political purposes in 1973 and they’re still on the books and New York’s prisons are still bloated because of them. A Democrat administration probably wouldn’t have been so anti-civil-libertarian in its response to 9/11, but one coming along now is unlikely to tear down any walls through which a potential malefactor might slip. Politicians live in fear and the thing they fear most is having the other guys be able to say later, “You let somebody get away with our side had safeguards up to protect against.”

It took decades for Fort Erie, Buffalo and the Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority to figured out a way to work together for the common good through the medium of the collaborative enterprise they have called the Partnering Group. It now seems that Washington bureaucrats took only a few months to cripple the entire process.

 Buffalo Report home page

Copyright 2004 by Buffalo Report, Inc.