New York Congressmen Urge McAleenan, DHS Secretary to Speed Up Processing Along Northern Border
Upstate New York Reps. Chris Collins, a Republican, and Brian Higgins, a Democrat, urged Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and CBP Acting Commissioner Kevin McAleenan to implement procedures to reduce processing times at the northern U.S. border for commercial vehicles, Collins’ office said (here). Modernizing the collection of the port-of-entry user fee and requiring all empty trucks to report via e-manifest would reduce processing times, the lawmakers wrote in a letter to the officials (here). “Most people understand that congestion at international crossings, particularly truck congestion, is primarily due to Customs procedures,” Peace Bridge (N.Y.) Authority General Manager Ron Rienas said in a statement. “These common sense regulatory fixes should be implemented as soon as possible. Having Customs officers collecting cash and manually inputting manifest data does nothing to enhance national security.”
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E-manifests have been a requirement for all trucks crossing the northern border, except for those with empty containers, and empty trucks with no e-manifest filed must wait while a CBP official manually files the manifest data, adding an additional 75 seconds of processing time per truck, the letter says. "Of the nearly six million trucks that crossed the Northern border at a Land Port of Entry in 2016, over one million of those trucks contained empty containers, resulting in significant impacts and delays and unnecessarily tying up CBP officers on non-mission critical tasks," the letter says. Further, about 10 percent of trucks at the Peace Bridge pay port-of-entry user fees by cash or credit card, even though paying by transponder or pre-payment can expedite processing by up to 90 seconds, the lawmaker said.