Aligning Strategy with Technology to Fortify the Northern Border

How DHS Will Use Technology to Meet the Key Strategic Objectives Outlined in the 2018 Northern Border Strategy

In 2018, DHS released an assessment of Northern Border security concluding that while the Northern Border remains an area of limited threat in comparison to the U.S. Southern Border, safeguarding and securing the Northern Border presents unique challenges related to terrain, the high volume of legitimate travel, criminal activity and poor infrastructure. In an effort to mitigate these risk, DHS released a new Northern Border Strategy that establishes a clear vision and discrete actions to be taken that will collectively improve DHS’s efforts to safeguard the Northern Border against terrorist and criminal threats, facilitate the flow of lawful cross-border trade and travel, and strengthen cross-border community resilience. The 3 key objectives listed in this strategy are:

• Enhance Border Security Operations 
  
• Facilitate and Safeguard Lawful Trade and Travel 
• Promote Cross-border Resilience

In this article, we provide an overview of those objectives and align them with the planned technology investments outlined in the 2020 budget request such as:

• Aircraft and vessels used for maritime and land  detection, surveillance missions, and transportation of cargo and people
• Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS)
• Non-Intrusive Inspection (NII) Equipment Refresh/Recapitalization
• Remote Video Surveillance Systems (RVSS)
• Unattended Ground Sensors (UGS)
• Opioid Detection Equipment and Safeguards

Find out how much DHS is investing in the following technologies and how they intend to leverage them to preserve national security, protect economic vitality, enable operational agility and enable cross-border as well as cross-agency collaboration.