This week the Detroit Free Press reported that a high-tech network system of surveillance cameras to be installed along Michigan’s 804-mile border with Canada is still not operational.  Border agents have said that the surveillance cameras provide agency manpower in remote areas of the northern and southern borders.

Due to a more than one-year delay of the network system’s installation, the Office of the Inspector General for the General Services Administration spent a week in Michigan examining the situation.  The investigation was launched after a departmental audit discovered considerable financial waste and phony contracts within the General Services Administration.  The Office of the Inspector General is responsible for conducting audits of financial contracts and examining criminal misconduct. 

The General Services Administration awarded a $200-million contract in 2002 to International Microwave Corp. (IMC), based in Connecticut.  Soon after the agreement was signed, IMC was purchased by L-3 Communications Inc.  Company officials of

L-3 Communications Inc. could not be reached for comment.

Homeland Security Department Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson appeared at a June 17th budget hearing before a U.S. Senate committee on science and transportation.  Even though the first set of cameras is more than a year overdue, Hutchinson presented a FY05 budget request of $64 million for additional surveillance cameras along the Michigan and Canada borders.

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The Arizona Daily Star recently reported that 27 illegal border crossers were rescued in Arizona in three separate incidents on the same day.  In the first incident, a call was made to the Tucson Border Patrol station, reporting that a group of 23 people was out of water and in distress in the desert west of Kitt Peak Observatory.  At about the same time the Special Response Team was patrolling another area and came across an immigrant who informed them that three individuals accompanying him were left behind because of extreme fatigue.  The third incident involved a confrontation of another agent who was patrolling a village and found an entrant in distress.  In response to all three incidents, the entrants were located and given appropriate treatment by the Border Patrol’s Search, Trauma and Rescue Team (BOR-STAR).

As of last Thursday, 321 illegal border crossers have been rescued since the beginning of the fiscal year in October 2003.  Now, 110 agents are committed to the BOR-STAR unit and rescues are up from 245 at about this time last year.