The moment weve all been waiting for. Weve been talking about cbp and the Important Role that these important agencies play in creating a competitive u. S. mexico border. Were excited to have our guest speaker 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 on going relationship with cbp. Thats certainly the case for us at the Border Trade Alliance. Our relationship, our partnership, the communication is critical. Cbp ensures Border Security and the efficient movement of people and goods across our ports of entry. Were grateful for cbps work to reduce 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, Deputy Executive Assistant Commission for the office of Field Operations at u. S. Customs and border protection. In 1991 he joined the Customs Service as a customs inspector and worked at the new York New Jersey seaport and the land border port of entry at laredo, texas before being assigned to headquarters. You have a fan. Serving in his current role since 2014 mr. Wagner oversees nearly 30,000 employees including approximately 23,000 cbp officers and over 2,400 cbp agricultural specialists, annual operating budget of 4. 8 billion provides for operations at over 330 ports of entry, and many programs that support the National Security, the immigration customs and commercial trade related missions of cbp. Mr. Wagner has been a leader in developing transformative efforts for the organization including the development of Global Entry Program and the automated passport control kiosks for international travelers. Overall, mr. Wagner is recognized as the driving force behind many of cbps resource, time saving initiatives. While simultaneous enhancing Security Operations at the ports of entry. Please join me in welcoming mr. Wagner, Deputy Assistant commissioner. [ applause ] you didnt have to say the whole title. Youve earned it. Its too long. Not good to have a long title in washington. I lived and worked in laredo from 1993 to 1999. We were talking out in the hallway that i was the minudo champion in 1999. How do you earn that . Its a story i cant here, maybe afterwards. Its quite a story. Thank you for the kind intro. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about what were doing in cbp. The border, the challenges today are like weve never seen before. Well start with the migrant crisis. Everyone knows were encountering record numbers like weve never seen before, just an unprecedented flow of people coming through the border. Its impacting the whole country. Its impacting everything were trying to do. Its impacting both countries really. Weve got to figure out ways to Work Together to solve these. Earl yier this month the u. S. A mexico got together to talk about these challenges and the vital importance of the teamwork between both countries. Weve agreed to strengthen that 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 open for business and vital to both countries that it remain so, and it remains secure. Our Border Patrol agents, cbp officers, we recognize that delicate balancing act that defines cbps duty. Protect the border and enforce the laws while facilitating travel. To that end were determine to manage this Border Security crisis, its a humanitarian crisis, as best we can while ensuring the border remains open and all the work we do around the country and around the world, continues to operate. The importance of this is really leveraging a lot of technology and a lot of cooperation. You may have heard about our unified cargo processing. This was something we built with the government of mexico. Onestop Business Environment for processing inbound and outbound cargo and truck rail and air modes. We work with s. A. T. In mexico and do joint cargo clearance and joint cargo examinations. The benefits, what weve seen, enhances security on both sides. Its a streamlined operation. Weve seen 50 or greater reduction in wait times when we can do this and seen a 99 trade compliance rate for participants in this. Lowering the cost of business for everyone in these operations. We started this in laredo. Still laredo proud after all these years, where we launched a cargo pre inspection pilot for southbound cargo in october 2015. Weve steadily expanded this unified cargo process ever since across the southwest border. Most recently we went to the port of t akate and doing the unified process for northbound commercial trucks since last september. So for next steps, were meeting collectively with s. A. T. And our colleagues in the Canada Border Services agency, and working on joint criteria for unified cargo processing in the air cargo environment. We plan to launch this soon in phoenix at the mesa gateway user fee airport and discussing other expansion locations, primarily in texas to capitalize on the unified cargo processing immediate cross border trade benefits. As we talk about the technology and our nonintrusive inspection systems, this is a program weve built over the years. I laugh because when i worked on the border down in laredo mayor, how are you, sir the only technology we had was a drill. The trucks would drive by and wed drill holes in them. Wed hat a brass mallett and wed tap the tanks. I think we had one big xray machine in oteay mesa. Now we have hundreds of systems. Weve built this fleet of equipment and we dont have to drill holes in things anymore. We think about, okay, whats next . Where do we go with this next . Congress was very generous to us last year. We were given over 500 million to build out, recapitalizes that fleet. Some of this equipment is 15, 20, 25 years old. But we dont want to just buy the same stuff. We challenge ourselves, what can we do next with this . Really this has the potential to transform how we do cargo processing on the border. If we can our vision is really to build these drivethrough systems where if a truck can drive through and we can have a high energy and low Energy System operating at the same time, so wed use low energy on the cab where the driver is in there and the high energy on the cargo, and we can centralize where these images go to and have algorithms help us interpret that data, not only can we scan 100 of the trucks coming in, but we could do it really quick where the trucks might not have to stop or stop very long to do that. If you look at how we billed out facilities and how we can route the trucks differently through our facility to take advantage of this, and if we can tie all this in together ill talk about farnl recognition a little later. You can do facial recognition on the truck driver when they pull up. That kicks off the transactions and the scans and all this can be automated. Theres Great Potential for us to completely transform how we do the truck inspections. Were testing some of the low energy drivethrough systems right now, i think in brownsville, an empty Truck Driving through and see how that works while we work with vendors to work on the high energy components. The trains can come through slowly. We can image and scan that as it goes by. No reason we cant build a similar system for trucks. Think about the potential of what that brings to all of us, to be able to build out those systems. Thank you to all the communities and operators working with us to build that out. As we test the equipment this year into next year, we look forward to doing this, and tieing it into the advances we made with rfid. I mentioned the facial recognition, the bio metrics, the license plate reersd. For people, looking at Self Reporting applications on a smart phone. Its really going to be an exciting time for us as we develop new concepts and new ideas. One of the things we like to pride ourselves in in cbp is were never satisfied with the status quo. Coming up on our 230th Year Anniversary in july with the formation of the Customs Service and look at the iterations over the years of what weve been annual to do. We do that by the commissioner now, acting secretary mcal lean and once coined the phrase, well be relentless self critical. Wheel always challenge the status quo and find better ways to do things. So the facial recognition, doing a lot of work at the airports, at the sea ports. Were trying some things out in vehicle lanes, in pedestrian lanes at the border. Were trying to capitalize on data we already have. If everyone already has a travel document, it means weave already got photos of people. So why not use those in a way thats really efficient for the people crossing the border. Lets figure out a ways to do this as the cameras get better and better and can take a picture and just match against that travel document without us having to handle the document or read the rfid scan. As we billed out systems to do this, what is crossing that border then look like. Should we equip officers with bodyworn cameras that, as theyre talking to travelers or Truck Drivers, it automatically picks the face up and matches against the travel document, automatically runs all the queries we need to run in our systems and how much time can that save us . How much more secure can that make us and more accurate that can make us, too. Again, look for exciting developments as we do this. When i say were open for business, it also means automating our processes and how we handle routine and lowrisk entries. It frees officers and devotes attention to highrisk cargo. More importantly, it helps your members, americas import and export community. We want to do business faster and more securely. Ace is a great example, blockchain technology, how that fits in. Well 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. We want to incorporate these into how the government does business as well, too. We want to do that in partnership with all of you. We look at, also, still a Human Element of this. The staffing piece of what we do. For years we struggled with the staffing, especially on the southwest border. We have a high turnover rate there. We struggle to hire officers timely and keep those vacant positions funded. Congress was very generous to us a couple years ago, gave us 2,000 officers in our budget. For a couple years we could only hire a thousand of them. Im glad to report this year, based on work we started last year where we hired above our attrition about 300 officers. This year were on pace to hire a thousand over attrition or potentially 1,200 to 1,300. Normal attrition is 700 do 800 nationwide. Were looking to hire over 2,000 cbp officers this year. By the end of this year we would have all those vacancies filled for the first time in many, many years. Our system freezes up and asks for more. We can hire them. I dont want to say the hiring process is fixed because it takes a long time. Theres some things were working on in doing that. Its about focusing our recruiters around the country, building up what we call destination guides, if were recruiting in chicago and we have vacancies in el paso, we can talk to potential job applicants about the benefits of living and working in el paso or any other station where we need to put people. Weve been out talking to a lot of chambers of commerce. How do you sell the city to attract business, and if we can bring 100 federal employees down there, help us convince people these are great places to live. I went from new york city to laredo. I went on a tdy and ended up staying. How do i take that experience and translate that into people coming out of the military or College Graduates or other people interested in this work. I can sell them on the agency. Thats always easy. 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. Weve kiktd off what we call a fast track hiring process, a pilot we ran. We took a handful of applicants. The things with hr, when you apply for a job, you go to the bottom of the pile and wait ten, 12 months for you application to come to the top. We sort of pre evaluated people and put easy applicants on the top and give them a priority appointment, how quick could we hire somebody . What normally takes 10 to 12 months now, we hired somebody in 26 days from start to finish. The officer went to laredo. Thats where they went. It was great. We had a motivated applicant and we found the spot for that person within a month. We hire a handful of people within 30 to 45 days. Now we take those lessons and incorn rate them into the bigger hiring process. If we can fix that hiring process, we can attract quality applicants into our workforce because they need a job and theyll want a job quickly. Who has 12 months to wait for a job . Somebody else will scoop you up in the meantime. We plan to hire were making plans for potentially several more thousand next year depending, of course, how the budgets shake out and see what our vacancy rate is at that point in time. Our position should be filled. This is critically important because even with the migration crisis and some of the challenges and struggles weve had in managing that, weve got 700 officers right now detailed from around the country just to the Border Patrol stations. We started with a bunch from the southwest border. We saw the trucks and cars back up. We went to the airports and sea ports and started detailing people to the Border Patrol stations to help them out, and really just the care and the processing of the migrants as they go into that process and get that work done. But this is really the only way weve been able to survive because our southwest border is fairly well staffed to what were funded for right now. If we didnt have that, it would be catastrophic. Were still pushing the hiring very strongly. Were still working on that process. Were still working on now it becomes a training problem. How do you get so many people through the academy and get them through quickly. We just jammed three more classes through this year. Well train over 2,000 cbp officers this year which are recordbreaking numbers. In the past we were lucky to do 700 to 1,000. Were pushing that hard because the people are the best part of our workforce. The technology is great, but we need the people to operate it and need the people to interpret it and the people that interact with you to think of new things to do and come up with better ways to do things. As we look at building a competitive border, it requires all of us. We have to adapt, adjust and acted date to change. Like i mentioned, the pace on us is always relentless. The first customs modernization act passed in 1993. A whole probably a couple generations ago. That year we witnessed a grand total of 600 websites in the whole world. Amazon hadnt even sold its first book yet. At the time, the socalled mod act was considered radical and it gave cbp or customs back then new enforcement authority. It created the National Customs automation program, ncap. Anybody remember that one . Like anything else, trade has undergone a massive transformation. We look at the ways of doing business today. Ecommerce. Look at how thats just upended how we do things and the volume of epacts we get in the mail coming from china and around the world and how do we adapt to these new business models. We 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 and our partner government agencies, we unveiled a map for the road ahead. Our 21st century customs framework, the five key pillars. First we believe ace and our other systems function as important infrastructure thats just as valuable as our roads and bridges. We want to ensure a selffunding stream so infrastructure will not fail when our stakeholders and partners need it most. Second is building on our commitment to one u. S. Government or one usg. Kpp wants to use the data we gather through ace more effectively. Were looking at data sharing opportunities with our stakeholders and Partner Agencies and allowing all partners to make better informed decisions in a more timely fashion. Thirdly, we want to make sure we work with our Industry Partners to identify roles and responsibilities that may exist outside current definitions. Fourth, we support intelligent enforcement, a concept of working with the stakeholders to improve Risk Management and impact our efforts to defect highrisk activity, deter noncompliance and deter fraudulent behavior. Lastly, we recognize that 20th century trade processes cannot support 21st century trade. Many of our procedures are designed for large containerized shipments. These shipments are no longer entirely representative of how International Trade operates. We have to figure out a way to adjust to that. Well talk about the usmca for a minute. A few words on that. Three countries are reviewing it to determine what new legislation is required prior to passing it. This includes provisions that directly affect cbp and homeland securitys operations including Customs Enforcement, trade facilitation and immigration. The entry of force into this would represent really a historic milestone in u. S. Trade policy, as it would signify for the first time the u. S. s renegotiated and replaced an existing free trade agreement. Theres large sections of the old nafta that remain untouched. The agreement doesnt change the zero tariffs policy on most manufacturing and agricultural goods. It provides unique opportunities for us to enhance our trade mission, codifies ambitious trade facilitation standards while adapting to a