The Coast Guard wins agency award for its Identix portable, rugged biometric handhelds used in the Mona Passage near the Dominican Republic to counteract illegal immigrants. The scanners are tied to the Homeland Security Department’s US-VISIT Automated Biometric Identification database (Ident). The program is now in place on five cutters. Biometric and biographic data from the migrants is transferred to laptops on the ships and stored in encrypted files, which are then sent to US-VISIT as e-mail attachments. The information is automatically erased from the handheld scanners when it is transferred to the laptop. Results are returned within two minutes. Based on the fingerprints collected to date, 9 percent of the fingerprint matches to US-VISIT’s database are convicted felons, and 20 percent have orders of deportation barring them from entering the United States.

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