Fentanyl scanners that sat idle for lack of federal funds can now be installed at the border

Fifty-six scanning systems that can detect fentanyl in personal vehicles at southern U.S. border crossings will now be installed because of $200 million in new funding that was approved by Congress after NBC News reported the scanners were sitting unused in warehouses.

Ninety-five percent of the fentanyl U.S. law enforcement seizes is discovered in personal vehicles driven across the border by U.S. citizens, according to Department of Homeland Security officials, and the scanners are the strongest tool the Biden administration has to detect fentanyl in vehicles.

After the NBC News report, two senators, three House members and two state attorneys general called for additional funding to install the scanners that had been previously requested by DHS. Funding to finally install the machines came through the House Homeland Security appropriations bill, which Congress passed in late March.

The 56 that will be installed because of the new funding will be in place by 2026, according to a senior Customs and Border Protection official. Thirty-one scanning systems are already in place, and 27 are under construction. All of the scanners were appropriated in 2021.

DHS says that once the scanners are in place, 40% of all personal vehicles crossing the border will be scanned. Now, fewer than 5% of personal vehicles are X-rayed, according to DHS officials.

At ports of entry without scanners, customs officers have to rely on their own intuition to detect something amiss and hold vehicles for further inspection.

Since 2021, the U.S. government has struggled to install fentanyl scanners at ports of entry. Critics have applauded the progress but say it’s still just a drop in the bucket.

Bobby Watt was at CBP for over 30 years and oversaw non-intrusive inspection scanning at ports of entry before he left CBP in 2019; he blames red tape for the delays. He says the goal should be to scan 100% of personal vehicles.

“It’d be foolish not to,” said Watt, now an adviser to scanning contractor Viken Detection. “Because if you were a drug smuggler, would you go to a port that had an X-ray? Or would you go to the one next to it that didn’t have an X-ray?”

DHS has pointed to construction challenges with installation, such as a lack of room at ports of entry to install the systems, and says it doesn’t have the funding from Congress needed to scan 100% of vehicles. The senior CBP official said the 40% of vehicles that will be scanned won’t be randomly chosen; instead, they’ll be vehicles determined to pose the highest risk.

New congressional funding to reach 40% of the vehicles was hailed by some parents who have lost children to fentanyl, like Cindy DeMaio, who lost her daughter in Ohio to fentanyl poisoning in 2016.

DeMaio works with parents around the country to educate others about fentanyl, including putting up billboards along the southern border where fentanyl is being driven across. “Anything we can do to increase the catching of these people and decrease the negative impacts on our country is extremely powerful,” she said.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, has criticized the slow efforts to install the scanners. In the fall he called for the Government Accountability Office to examine how DHS has spent more than a billion dollars on the X-ray equipment. The inquiry is underway, a GAO spokesperson said, and a report will be completed this year.

Cornyn and Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., want any new scanners to be tested to ensure that any technology purchased in the future is the most effective. They introduced a bipartisan bill this year to evaluate five kinds of scanners to ensure they catch the most fentanyl.

“Last year, Customs and Border Protection seized enough fentanyl at the southern border to kill every American 16 times over, and we have no way of knowing how much more evaded law enforcement,” Cornyn said. “This legislation would help address glaring problems in the fentanyl detection system by requiring CBP to test new pieces of detection technology at land ports of entry so we can prevent this deadly drug from claiming more lives.”