CBP Cites ‘Operational Vulnerabilities’ in Refusing to Release Data on Migrant Flights

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has admitted that its organization of flights for hundreds of thousands of foreigners from external airports to the U.S. has resulted in "operational vulnerabilities" that could present a threat to border enforcement efforts should data on the flights become public.

In a joint filing with the U.S. Center for Immigration Studies, CBP has justified its refusal to provide data about the traffic from specific foreign airports to specific U.S. facilities by citing the potential for risk should the material become public. CIS has sought the data as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

In the filing, CBP cited a specific exemption to FOIA requests, stating that it redacted relevant data "to protect the identifying information for air ports of entry, which if disclosed, would reveal information about the relative number of individuals arriving, and thus resources expended, at particular air ports of entry which would, either standing alone or combined with other information, reveal operational vulnerabilities that could be exploited."

They further indicated they could not produce information related to the foreign airports from which the would-be U.S. entrants departed "to protect the information, which, if disclosed, would reveal information about the relative number of individuals arriving from particular foreign airports, and thus the resources expended toward travelers arriving from particular airports which could, either standing alone or combined with other information, enable bad actors to extrapolate relevant port of arrival and resources utilized at those ports of entry and the resources utilized at those ports of entry."

The flight program, CIS asserts, has brought in roughly 320,000 otherwise inadmissible persons to the U.S. since it began in 2022. The program makes use of the CBP One app through which those seeking entry may apply preemptively for humanitarian release and travel authorization.

The CBP One app has come under scrutiny from border hawks, including members of the House Homeland Security Committee, which in October released documents showing that the Department of Homeland Security used the app to approve entry for hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals from politically hostile countries, including Russia, Belarus, China, Iran, and Afghanistan.