Federal Reports

I am pleased to submit the Amtrak Office of Inspector General (OIG) Semiannual Report to the United States Congress for the six months ending March 31, 2021. One year ago, we were in the very early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when Amtrak’s ridership and revenue plunged to record lows. Since then, the company has received more than $3.7 billion in federal funding dedicated to addressing pandemic-related requirements, restoring long distance service, and recalling employees that were furloughed in 2020.During this time, we made our own adjustments, which included transitioning to full-time telework to better protect our employees and balancing our oversight mission requirements against the company’s urgent needs to address significant challenges associated with the pandemic. We refocused our efforts on providing oversight of pandemic-related funding, how executive decisions were impacting company operations, advising the company and our other stakeholders on the most significant management challenges the company will face in the coming years, and pursuing dozens of investigations ranging from policy violations to significant criminal activity.We also decided to move up our bi-annual report on the most significant management challenges facing the company. We found the challenge of responding to the pandemic superseded and permeated the company’s ability to address all other challenges, and that it would need to adapt and develop a strategy to position itself to become a transportation mode of choice in a rapidly changing economy. Additionally, we identified opportunities in safety, security, financial management, and other areas where the company has made progress, but significant work remains on improving its effectiveness and efficiency.

We determined DHS law enforcement components did not consistently collect DNA from arrestees as required. Of the five DHS law enforcement components we reviewed that are subject to these DNA collection requirements, only Secret Service consistently collected DNA from arrestees. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Federal Protective Service inconsistently collected DNA, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) collected no DNA. DHS did not adequately oversee its law enforcement components to ensure they properly implemented DNA collection. Based on our analysis, we project the DHS law enforcement components we audited did not collect DNA for about 212,646, or 88 percent, of the 241,753 arrestees from fiscal years 2018 and 2019. Without all DHS arrestees’ DNA samples in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s criminal database, law enforcement likely missed opportunities to receive investigative leads based on DNA matches. Additionally, DHS did not benefit from a unity of effort, such as sharing and leveraging processes, data collection, and best practices across components. We recommended DHS oversee and guide its law enforcement components to ensure they comply with collection requirements. DHS concurred with all four of our recommend.

We determined that before July 12, 2018, migrant parents did not consistently have the opportunity to reunify with their children before removal. Although DHS and ICE have claimed that parents removed without their children chose to leave them behind, there was no policy or standard process requiring ICE officers to ascertain, document, or honor parents’ decisions regarding their children. As a result, from the time the Government began increasing criminal prosecutions in July 2017, ICE removed at least 348 separated parents without documenting whether those parents wanted to leave their children in the United States. In fact, ICE removed some parents without their children despite having evidence the parents wanted to bring their children back to their home country. In addition, we found that some ICE records purportedly documenting migrant parents’ decisions to leave their children in the United States were significantly flawed. We made two recommendation that will ensure ICE documents separated migrant parents’ decisions regarding their minor children upon removal from the United States, and develops a process to share information with Government officials to contact parents for whom ICE lacks documentation on reunification preferences. ICE concurred with our recommendations.