CBP Targeted Americans Associated with the 2018-2019 Migrant Caravan

We focused on the Trusted Traveler Programs (TTP) membership revocations of three U.S. citizens associated with the migrant caravan and whether CBP revoked the TTP memberships in retaliation for the individuals’ support of the migrant caravan. We also addressed systemic issues related to TTP revocations that we identified while reviewing those three revocations. We found that CBP revoked three U.S. citizens’ TTP memberships after discovering links to information that it considered derogatory and a potential security risk. In two of the revocations, CBP did not assess the quality or accuracy of the potentially derogatory information at any step of the process. Specifically, we determined that CBP officers did not evaluate unsubstantiated information, and made unsupported conclusions and placed lookouts in TECS on these two individuals. Further, because of CBP’s policy to revoke memberships based on positive matches to TECS records, CBP revoked these two memberships without evaluating the underlying information. We made two recommendations to ensure two TTP membership revocations were based on quality and accurate information and to issue guidance to personnel about TTP revocation standards.