Hassan Presses CBP Commissioner on Lagging Border Scanning Mandate

Sen. Maggie Hassan, Democrat of New Hampshire and a senior member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, sent a letter to Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott demanding an account of the agency's progress, and timetable, for deploying non-intrusive inspection technology at land ports of entry [POLITICO]. The demand tracks a statutory requirement: Congress passed the bipartisan Securing America's Ports Act in 2021, directing CBP to produce plans ensuring that all vehicles entering the United States would be screened using NII technology by 2027. That deadline is now in jeopardy, and the gap between mandate and performance is documented in federal audit findings.

CBP has made progress deploying large-scale NII systems, primarily X-ray machines used to inspect vehicles at land ports of entry, but as of February 2025, only 52 of 153 planned systems were fully operational, nearly all in preprimary inspection areas. As of that same date, CBP was scanning fewer than 10 percent of passenger vehicles, with no plans to deploy additional NII equipment at several major ports of entry. The Securing America's Ports Act required 100 percent scanning of commercial and passenger vehicles and freight rail at land ports of entry by 2027, but as of February 2025, CBP did not expect to complete all of its planned large-scale NII deployments until December 2029.

The Government Accountability Office laid out the scope of the shortfall in a September 2025 report. CBP's deployment plans exclude nine major crossings that account for nearly 40 percent of passenger vehicle traffic at the southwest border. Those nine crossings are Nogales-DeConcini, Lukeville and Naco in Arizona; Gateway to the Americas Bridge, Brownsville and Matamoros International Bridge and Gateway International Bridge in Texas; and Andrade, Otay Mesa and San Ysidro in California. GAO also found that deployment expenses have exceeded original estimates due to construction challenges and site-specific conditions, with installation costs for some commercial-vehicle scanning systems rising from initial estimates of roughly $1.3 million per system to more than $4 million. In addition, CBP has not defined the key performance measures it needs to evaluate the new scanning systems.

The operational picture is complicated by internal personnel pressures. A CBP official acknowledged to a House subcommittee in January 2026 that the agency has assigned personnel to immigration enforcement surge operations with ICE, a fact that Democratic members pressed as a potential contributor to NII deployment delays, though CBP's acting executive assistant commissioner for the Office of Field Operations characterized such reassignments as neither new nor unique. Hassan's letter to Scott noted that even where NII systems have been installed, GAO found that limited staffing and system outages constrained their use, with only around half of individual large-scale NII systems meeting CBP's operational-availability targets in fiscal year 2024.

Hassan's letter, shared first with POLITICO, pressed Scott on two specific questions: the agency's revised timeline for NII implementation at major crossings, and how recent CBP staffing reallocations will affect that schedule [POLITICO]. The letter cited the Trump administration's stated cartel-enforcement priorities and new federal investments in AI as factors that should, in Hassan's framing, reduce the historical barriers to deployment. Those barriers, the letter noted, have included project mismanagement, competing agency priorities, inadequate funding and engineering challenges [POLITICO]. CBP did not respond to a request for comment on the letter [POLITICO].

The oversight push arrives against a backdrop of increased federal spending on border technology. Since 2019, CBP's NII program has received over $2 billion for systems to enhance inspections of commercial and passenger vehicles and trains. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which CBP Commissioner Scott described in February 2026 Senate testimony as a $65 billion border security measure, represents the largest single border security investment in a generation. Scott testified that CBP is investing that funding in non-intrusive inspection, biometrics, border surveillance equipment, aircraft and communications systems. Whether that commitment translates into closing the 2027 statutory gap before the mandate lapses remains the central question Hassan's letter puts to the agency.

The stakes are not procedural. Drug smuggling through ports of entry remains the primary mode by which fentanyl enters the United States, and approximately 80 percent of DHS fentanyl seizures in fiscal years 2021 through 2024 occurred in the Southwest border region, with 75 percent of drugs seized by CBP in that region in fiscal year 2025 taken at ports of entry. GAO's acting director of the relevant program area told a House subcommittee in January 2026 that achieving the 100 percent scanning requirement will take longer than CBP's current schedule suggests, because the schedule omits systems not yet procured and excludes the nine highest-traffic crossings.