Home Media Center News Releases

Washington, D.C.—The head of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) today called on the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to immediately develop and provide to employees written information on how frontline security workers can protect themselves and the public in the event of exposure to potential threats such as avian flu.

In a letter to a senior CBP official, NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley said an incident last Thursday at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York “highlights a lack of information and process around situations where employees—and possibly the public—could have potentially been exposed to an infectious disease.”

The incident that gave rise to the Kelley demand was an attempt to smuggle birds in through the airport and in which appropriate agriculture protocol was not followed, potentially exposing employees and members of the traveling public to significant danger.

The NTEU leader said the handling of the bird-smuggling incident underscores the problems with CBP’s ‘One Face at the Border’ program, under which inspectors from the former Customs Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service and Agriculture Department are expected to perform each others’ duties without adequate training. The result has been a severe loss of inspectional expertise.

At JFK last Thursday, Kelley said, the absence of an agriculture supervisor at a critical moment could have led to a disastrous outcome.

Kelley has been vocal, both in meetings with CBP and Department of Homeland Security officials and in congressional testimony, about the need for additional staffing and funding to ensure that the nation’s ports of entry have the manpower they need and that more cargo is inspected.

“It is ludicrous to think that one employee can be trained to perform the highly-specialized duties needed to ensure that borders and ports are safe from undesirable persons, drugs, guns, contraband, terrorists, criminals, infectious diseases, and harmful insects,” she said. “It is clear that Customs, Immigration and Agriculture require experts in each area working in tandem to protect the public.”

She called on CBP to “immediately reexamine” the ‘One Face’ initiative and border staffing “to ensure there is adequate specialization at all ports of entry.”

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 federal workers in 30 agencies and departments, including nearly 16,000 in CBP.