And ice and the Important Role that these important agencies play and making the Us Mexico Border a competitive usmexico border so we are excited to have our guest are here today. Whether youre in the private sector, trade organization , if youre here, if you have anything to do with the border, you care very much about your ongoing relationship with cbp but certainly the case for us as a border trade alliance, our relationship, our partnership, the communication is critical. As cbp ensures Border Security and the efficient movement of people across our ports of entry. Were grateful for cbps work to increase border wait times which is one of the most challenging barriers to trade. Today yesterday and hopefully not tomorrow. Its my great pleasure to introduce john wagner, hes debbie assessed and commissioner for the Field Operations at us customs and border protection. He began his federal lawenforcement career in 1991 when he joined the Us Customs Service as a customs inspector and worked at the new York New Jersey seaport and the land support border port of entry at laredo texas before being assigned to headquarters. You have a fan club here. Serving in his current role since 2014, Mister Wagner oversees nearly 30,000 employees including approximately 20,000 cbp officers and 2400 cbp agricultural specialists. An annual operating budget of 4. 8 billion provide for operations at over 330 ports of entry and many programs that support the National Security, immigration customs and commercial trade related missions of cbp and in the 25 years plus of service Mister Wagner has been a leader in developing many successful transformative efforts for the organization including the development of global entry programs and the automated passport control kiosks for International Travel holders. Overall Mister Weiner is recognized as a driving force between many of resource saving time saving and timesaving initiatives. While enhancing security operates at the port of entry. Please join me in welcoming Mister Wagner, deputy executive assistant commissioner. Going to have to sit in the whole title. Is too long. At the top long title in washington. I lived and worked in laredo from 1993 to 1999. Were talking about it in the hallway that i was the menudo champion in 1999. We got a trophy. How do you earn that . Its a story i cant tell here but maybe afterwards because its quite a story. Thank you for the kind intro and i appreciate the opportunity to talk about what were doing in cbp. The border, the challenges today are just like weve never seen before. To start with a migrant crisis, everyone knows, we are encountering record numbers like weve never seen before. Just an unprecedented flow of people coming through the border and its impacting the whole country. Its impacting everything were trying to do and its impacting both countries really and weve got to figure out ways to Work Together to solve these. Earlier this month the us and mexico got together to talk about some of thesechallenges. And the vital importance of the teamwork between both countries and we agreed to strengthen the cooperation and find better ways to really secure the border and make the border a lot more efficient. But the overwhelming message, the border is openfor business. Its vital to both countries that have remained so and it remains secure and our Border Patrol agents, our officers, we recognize that delicate balancing act. That defines their duty, protect the border and enforce the laws while facilitating trade and travel and its a dual mission, they work in conjunction with each other. To that end, were determined to manage this Border Security crisis which is a humanitarian crisis. As best we can while ensuring the border remains open and all of the other work we do around the country and around the world continues to operate. The importance of this is leveraging a lot of technology and a lot of cooperation. You may have heard about our unified cargo process. This is something we dont with the government of mexico and onestop Business Environment for processing inbound and outbound cargo and truck rental and eventually air modes. Innovative concepts, we work with sap and mexico and do join cargo clearance and joint cargo examinations. The benefits, what weve seen enhances security on both sides. Its a streamlined operation. Weve seen the percent or greater reduction in wait times. Weve seen a 99 percent trade compliance rate part for participants in this and lowering the cost of business for everyone in these operations. We started this in laredo. Still laredo proud after all these years. When we launched a cargo reinspection pilot for southbound commercial air cargo in october 2015. We readily expanded this unified cargo process ever sent across the southwest border. Most recently we went to the port of a copy and were doing the unified process for northbound commercial trucks since last september. So for next steps were meeting collectively with sap and our colleagues in the Canada Border Services agency and working on joint criteria for unified cargo processing in the air cargo environments. We plan to launch this soon in phoenix at eight gateway user the airport and were discussing other expansion locations primarily in texas to capitalize on the unified cargo processing immediate crossborder trade benefits. So as we talk about the technology and our nonintrusive inspection systems, this is a program weve built over theyears. Last, i worked on the border inlaredo , and the only technology wehad was a drill. And the tractors drove all over them, we had a brass mallet and we got the tax but thats all we had been. I think we had one big xray machine in overtime mesa and one in far texas but it took years for us to build up this capability. That was hundreds of systems out there. And we dont this fleet of this nonintrusive inspection equipment and we dont have to drill holes in things anymore. We think about okay, whats next . Where do we go with this next and congress was generous to us last year. We were given over 500 million to build out, recapitalize that fleet. Some of this equipment is 15, 25 years old but we dont want to buy the same stuff so we challenge ourselves, what can we do next. This has the potential to transform how we do cargo processing on the border and if we can, our vision is to build these drivethrough systems where the truck could drivethrough and we could have a high energy and the lowenergy system , operating at the same time we would use lowenergy on the cat where the drivers in their highenergy on the cargo. And we can centralize where these images go to. We can have algorithms help us interpret that data. Not only can we potentially had 100 percent of the trucks coming in, we can do it quick where the trucks might not even have to stop. We might have to stop for long to do that. And if you look at how we build out facilities, and how we can wrap the trucks differently through our facility take advantage of this, and if we can hi all this in together and ill talk about facial recognition a little later but we can do facial recognition on the truck driver when they pull up and the transaction and the stands and all this work and automated. Theres potential there for us to completely transform again how we do those truck inspections. Were testing some of the lowenergy drivethrough systems right now and i think brownsville where we do antitrucks driving through and seeing how that works while we work with the vendors to build highenergy components so we can do loaded vehicles as well but you see when the trains can come through slowly and we can image and scan train as it comes by theres no reason we cant build a similar system for trucks. You think about the potential of what that brings to all of us to be able to build out those systems. To all the communities and operators working with us to build these out and as we test this equipment out over this year into next year, we really look forward to doing this and time into the advances we made with rfid mention the facial recognition, biometrics. The license plate readers. Poor people, were looking at Self Reporting applications on a smart phone. Its really going to be an exciting time for us over the next couple of years as we develop new concepts and new ideas. One of the things we like to pride ourselves in cdp is never satisfied with the status quo. Coming up on our 230 year anniversary. The end of july with the formation of the Customs Service and i look at iterations over the years of what weve been able to do and we do that by the commissioner now acting secretary mac delaney once coined the phrase we will be relentlessly selfcritical and i hope you see us as partners in that, that were always going to challenge the status quo and find better ways to do things. So the facial recognition, were doing a lot of work at theairport and a lot of work at the seaport. Were trying some things out in vehicle lanes and pedestrian lanes at the border. Were trying to capitalize on dale we already have. Already everyone already has a travel document it means weve already got photos of people so why not use those in a way that really efficient for the people crossing the border. Lets figure out ways to do this as the cameras get better and better, we can take a picture match against that travel document without us having to handle the documents or lead tomorrow iv stand and as we build out system to do this, were just crossing the border and what is look like and should we equip officers with body cameras and as were talking to travelers or Truck Drivers, it automatically kicks the face of matches against the travel document, automatically runs all the queries we need to run in our systems and how much time can save us, how much more secure can make us and more accurate can make us too. Again, a lot of exciting developments as we do this but i say we are open for business. It also means automating our processes and how we handle routine in the low risk entries. And it frees officers and devote more attention to highrisk cargo. More importantly it helps all of your members, americas import and export Community Want to do business faster and of course more securely. Ace is a great example, block chain technology, how that fits in. Going to find a way to figure that out. We look at all the things happening in the Consumer World today, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, robotics, predictive analytics, innovation and we want to incorporate the how the government does business and we want to do that in partnership with all of you. We look at also the theres still a human element. The staffing piece of what we do. For years, we struggled with a staffing, especially on the southwest border. We have a high turnover rate there. We struggled to hire officers kindly and keep those vacant positions funded. Congress is very generous to us a couple years ago, gave us 2000 officers in our budget and for a couple years we could onlyhire 1000 of them. Im glad to report this year , based on the work we started last year, where we hired about our attrition about 300 officers, this year we are on pace to higher thousand over attrition, or potentially 12 or 1300 over attrition, our normal attrition is 7 to 800 year nationwide. Were looking to hire over 2000 cbp officers this year so by the end of this year we should have all of those vacancies build our funded level for congress for the first time in many years and of course that frees us up to go back and ask for more and say we can hire them, i dont want to say the hiring process is fixed because it will take a long time but theres things were working on doing that. Its aboutfocusing our recruiters around the country. Building up what we call destination guides so if we are recruiting in chicago and we have vacancies in el paso we can talk to job applicants about the benefits of living and working in el paso or any other station where we need to but weve been out talking a lot of the chambers of commerce and how do you sell the city to attract business . If we could bring 100 federal employees down there, convince people these are great places to live, i went from new york city to laredo and i voluntarily did that, i went to spain and how did i take that experience and translate that into people coming out of the military or College Graduates or other people interested in this work and to have these, sell them on the agency, thats always easy and how do we sell them on the work we do and go to the locations where we perform this work and whats so great about living and working there and convince them of all that but weve kicked off some what we call fast track hiring process, a little pilot we ran and we took a handful of applicants and things with hr, when you apply for a job you go to the bottom of the pile and you got to wait 10, 12 months but what if we preevaluated people to put easy applicants on the top right, how quick would we hire somebody. We hired somebody and normally takes 10 to 12 months, we hire somebody in 26 days from start to finish. And the officer went to laredo, thats where they went. We had a motivated applicant and we found a spot for that person within a month and we hired a handful of people within 30 to 45 days so now we incorporate them into the hiring process and i know if we can hiring process, also we can attract quality applicants into our workforce because they need a job and they wanted job quickly. Who has 12 months to wait for a job, somebody else will scoop you up in the meantime but we plan to hire, where making plans for potentially several more thousand next year. Depending of course how the budget shakes out and see what our vacancy rate is at that point. But our position should be filled and this is critically important because even with the migration crisis and some of the challenges and struggles we had in managing that and we got 700 officers right now yelled from around the country just to the Border Patrol station. We started with a bunch from the southwestborder , we saw the truck back up and the card back up. We went to the airports and seaports and start detailing people to the Border Patrol stations to help them out. And really just the care and processing of the migrants as they go into that process and get work done. But this is really the only way were going to survive our southwest border is fairly well staffed to what were funded for right now. And its really if we didnt have at this point, it would be catastrophic on us right now if we didnthave that. So were still pushing the hiring very strongly, still hiring process, working on now it becomes a training problem and how you get so many people through the academy and get them through quickly. We just jammed three more classes through this year and i think were going to train over 2000 new offices this year which are recordbreaking numbers. In the past its, we were lucky to do 700,000. So were really pushing that hard because the people are the best part of our workforce. Technologies great. But we need the people, we need the people to interpret and the people to interact with you and think of new things to do and come up with better ways to do things. So as we look atbuilding a competitive border , it requires all of us. We have to adapt, adjust and accommodate the change and id like to mention the pace on us is alwaysrelentless. The first customs modernization act in 1993. A whole probably a couple of generations ago. That year we witnessed a grand total ofwebsites in the whole world. I was, i dont think he sold his first book yet. And at the time, the socalled act was considered radical and gave cdd or customs back then new enforcement authorities but it created the National Customs automation program. Anybody remember that one . But like everything else, trade has undergone a massive transformation and we look at the ways of doing business today, ecommerce, look how that just offended out we do things. And the volume of e packets we get in the mail. Coming from china and around the world and how to do this new, these new business models. We just cant sit back and say you have to do it this way because weve always done it that way. Earlier this year, thanks to the input of our trade stakeholders in our partner government agencies, we unveiled a map of the road ahead. Our 21stcentury customs work , those five key pillars. First we believe that ace and in our other systems function as important infrastructure, is just as important as our roads and bridges and we want to ensure a self funding stream so infrastructure will not fail our stakeholders and ourpartners need it most. And is building on our commitments to one Us Government or one usg. Cbp wants to use the data we gathered through pace more effectively so were looking at data sharing opportunities with take holders and Partner Agencies allowing all parties to make that are informed decisions, more timely fashion and thirdly we want to make sure we work with our Industry Partners to identify roles and responsibilities that may exist outside our current definitions and forth, we support intelligence enforcement, the concept of working with the stakeholders to improve Risk Management and impact our efforts to defect highrisk activity, to deter noncompliance and her fraudulent behavior. And lastly we recognize that 20thcentury trade processes cannot support 21stcentury trade. Many of our procedures are designed for large containers on ships and the shipments are no longer entirely representative ofhow International Trade operates so we have to figure out a way to adjust. Will talk about the us and ca for a minute. If you work on that. Countries are reviewing it to determine what new legislation is required prior to passing it. This includes provisions that directly affect cdd and Homeland Security operations including Customs Enforcement, trade facilitation and integration. In the entry of forced into this when w