Congress to tighten border monitoring of disease carriers

The saga of 31-year-old Andrew Speaker, an Atlanta lawyer and a TB carrier who was allowed by border police to go and leave as he pleased, thus risking infecting hundreds of people, is a source of acute embarrassment for U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). The House Homeland Security Committee is taking the issue seriously, and is about to offer legislation which will limit the discretion border officers have in such cases. The committee is planning today to question federal authorities on why they had such a hard time catching up to a man armed only with a passport and a deadly disease.

DHS officials said the CBP henceforth would require officers to get approval from a supervisor before they override warnings such as the one issued to Speaker.

AP’s Devlin Barrett reports that Speaker flew to Europe last month for his wedding and honeymoon. Once there, he disregarded instructions by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to turn himself in to local health officials in Italy. Instead, Speaker flew to Canada on 24 May, then drove across the border into the United States, despite a lookout alert for him issued to all border posts. A lone U.S. border officer in Champlain, New York, with no more than a wave of a hand at a border crossing, confounded days of frantic efforts by health and security officials to track down the TB-carrying groom.

DHS officials are now investigating the Champlain officer’s conduct, while defending their own procedures. “We’re very confident that the system actually worked,” Jayson Ahern, the No. 2 official at Customs and Border Patrol, insisted last week. “There was a breakdown on the part of the officer.”

Lawmakers in the meantime said they would examine whether CDC officials mishandled their own role in the case, and whether they misunderstood the legal tools at their disposal to find and confine Speaker.