DHS Border Security Centers of Excellence program

It is good to see the IC CAE concept catching on elsewhere, and in increasing areas of specialization. The latest is the Department of Homeland Security / Science and Technology Directorate’s grant for a new university Center of Excellence for Border Security and Immigration (under DHS-07-ST-061-002). We hope the new program will contribute as much to the intelligence and operations community as it does to the technology space.

This award reminds us very much of the original Department of Justice efforts to create an academic partnership with Mercyhurst College in order to address border security, which was a key part of the old Borderline daily intelligence product (an innovative mix of open source and operational reporting produced by the old Immigration and Naturalization Service intelligence shop). A similar effort was created in conjunction with the old Cross Border Control International publication, in partnership with the Ridgway Center at University of Pittsburg. These efforts produced good results for a number of years, and we look forward (hopefully) to a successor emerging.

We should note that Patrick Henry College’s intelligence studies program has for some time been producing a weekly border security open source intelligence product, which to some degree picked up where the older Mercyhurst effort left off.

There are no doubt other efforts of which we are not aware, and we wish them all luck should they be in competition for the new grant.