Department of Homeland Security

In November 2024, we conducted onsite, unannounced inspections at four U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facilities in Southern Arizona and California: • Two U.S. Border Patrol (Border Patrol) facilities — Yuma soft- sided facility (SSF) and Wellton station — housed 510 detainees at the time...

We evaluated the Department of Homeland Security’s enterprise-wide security program for Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information intelligence systems.

We evaluated the Department of Homeland Security’s enterprise-wide security program for Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information intelligence systems.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) did not clearly assign law enforcement roles to its program offices, which led to internal disagreements and friction between TSA’s Law Enforcement/Federal Air Marshal Service (LE/FAMS) Insider Threat Section (ITS) and TSA Investigations related to...

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has conducted almost no familial deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) testing to verify biological parent-child relationships, potentially missing opportunities to protect vulnerable migrant children from human smuggling fraud schemes. From September 2021 to September...

U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) inconsistent processes for identifying special interest aliens (SIAs) created disparities in alien screening. In July 2023, CBP’s Office of Field Operations (OFO) San Diego Field Office and the U.S. Border Patrol (Border Patrol) Yuma and El Centro sectors...

We found that none of the three Department of Homeland Security components responsible for end of parole activities—U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — were designated to monitor parole expiration and DHS did...

We rated the Department of Homeland Security’s information security program for fiscal year 2024 as “effective,” according to this year’s reporting instructions. We based this rating on our evaluation of the Department’s compliance with requirements of the Federal Information Security Modernization...

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) did not fully leverage its large-scale non-intrusive inspection (NII) systems to detect contraband coming into the United States, potentially wasting taxpayer funds, missing opportunities to detect and seize contraband, and losing an important tool to fight...

During our unannounced inspection of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Buffalo Federal Detention Facility (Buffalo) in Batavia, New York, we found that Buffalo’s staff generally complied with Performance-Based National Detention Standards 2011, as revised in December 2016, for...