Reno Targets Border Patrol Bureaucracy : Immigration: Pilot program will computerize certain procedures to put more agents in the field. A better fingerprint system is also under development.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service is testing an automated system in the San Diego area that would free Border Patrol agents from paperwork burdens so they can concentrate on tightening U.S. borders, Atty. Gen. Janet Reno announced Thursday.

“Border Patrol agents have, up until now, been spending 40% of their valuable enforcement time doing paperwork,” said Reno, who complained after a border visit last August of finding agents driving buses and performing tasks that could be handled by technology.

At her weekly press conference, Reno also announced that a fingerprint system currently under development for the INS will identify criminal illegal residents at the border within minutes.

The automated paperwork system, called ENFORCE, was turned on Wednesday at three border patrol sites near San Diego and “will provide the equivalent of redeploying 48 agents to the line,” Reno said.

The system handles by computer 43 of 51 forms that agents previously have completed with typewriters or filled out longhand, freeing Border Patrol agents from much of the paperwork involved in processing illegal immigrants.

In the future, the system will be used to track cases by linking immigration enforcement and deportation systems that currently lack the means of exchanging data, officials said.

In unveiling the technology, Reno and INS Commissioner Doris Meissner noted that the agency has only enough money in its current budget to run the pilot effort for six months.

Final enactment of House and Senate crime bills now in conference to resolve differences would provide $200 million for INS technological developments, including the ENFORCE system and the fingerprint identification. That would be the largest part of the two to three years of funding needed to fully implement the system, according to Meissner.

“If we are going to deploy these technologies all along our border and develop others, Congress needs to pass the crime bill and appropriate funds,” Reno said.

The fingerprint system, which was described as in “the late stages of development,” will enable Border Patrol agents to identify an illegal immigrant from an electronic fingerprint within three to five minutes and to retrieve the individual’s criminal records, photographs and other information.

Meissner said the technology would help close a gap in the INS fingerprinting system that allows private firms to take prints from illegal residents for use on their INS applications without requiring them to prove their identities.

The INS has failed to regulate private companies and has no means of preventing immigrants intent on hiding their arrest records from enlisting someone with a clean history to submit their prints instead, according to a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

In a related development, the Justice Department announced that 53 Mexican nationals now in U.S. prisons after criminal convictions will be sent back to Mexican prisons today. It will be the third transfer under an accelerated program that resulted from Reno’s meeting in Mexico last October with Jorge Carpizio MacGregor, Mexico’s then-attorney general.

Reno praised the Mexican government for its role in the transfer, saying, “It is a common-sense answer to help ensure that U.S. prison space is used for U.S. citizens.” One-hundred eighty-six criminal foreigners have been returned to Mexico in the stepped-up transfers, which began last December.

Included in the transfer program are two state prisoners--one from California and the other from Texas.

Today’s transfer also will involve the exchange of seven Americans, including one woman, now being held in Mexican prisons and who will serve out their sentences in federal prisons. The Justice Department refused to identify any of the prisoners who are being transferred.

The department said it anticipates further transfers on a regular basis. The status of 8,000 Mexican nationals now serving time in federal prisons is under review by the Bureau of Prisons. About 330 Americans currently are serving time in Mexican prisons.