[Senate Hearing 115-317]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 115-317
COMBATTING THE OPIOID CRISIS: EXPLOITING VULNERABILITIES IN
INTERNATIONAL MAIL
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HEARING
BEFORE THE
PERMANENT SUBCOMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON
HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
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JANUARY 25, 2018
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Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.fdsys.gov/
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Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
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COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin, Chairman
JOHN McCAIN, Arizona CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri
ROB PORTMAN, Ohio THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware
RAND PAUL, Kentucky HEIDI HEITKAMP, North Dakota
JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma GARY C. PETERS, Michigan
MICHAEL B. ENZI, Wyoming MAGGIE HASSAN, New Hampshire
JOHN HOEVEN, North Dakota KAMALA D. HARRIS, California
STEVE DAINES, Montana DOUG JONES, Alabama
Christopher R. Hixon, Staff Director
Margaret E. Daum, Minority Staff Director
Laura W. Kilbride, Chief Clerk
Bonni Dinerstein, Hearing Clerk
PERMANENT SUBCOMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS
ROB PORTMAN, Ohio Chairman
JOHN McCAIN, Arizona THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware
RAND PAUL, Kentucky HEIDI HEITKAMP, North Dakota
JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma GARY C. PETERS, Michigan
STEVE DAINES, Montana MAGGIE HASSAN, New Hampshire
Andrew Dockham, Staff Director and Chief Counsel
John Kilvington, Minority Staff Director
Kate Kielceski, Chief Clerk
C O N T E N T S
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Opening statements:
Page
Senator Portman.............................................. 1
Senator Carper............................................... 5
Senator Johnson.............................................. 9
Senator Lankford............................................. 22
Senator Heitkamp............................................. 32
Senator Klobuchar............................................ 34
Senator Daines............................................... 37
Prepared statements:
Senator Portman.............................................. 55
Senator Carper............................................... 60
WITNESSES
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Joseph P. Murphy, Chief, Internationl Postal Affairs, Office of
Specialized and Technical Agencies, Bureau of International
Organizations, U.S. Department of State........................ 11
Robert Cintron, Vice President, Network Operations Management,
United States Postal Service; accompanied by Guy Cottrell,
Chief Postal Inspector, United States Postal Service........... 13
Todd C. Owen, Executive Assistant Commissioner, Office of Field
Operations, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Department
of Homeland Security........................................... 14
William Siemer, Acting Deputy Inspector General, Office of
Inspector General, United States Postal Service................ 16
Daniel D. Baldwin, Section Chief, Office of Global Enforcement,
Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Department of Justice.... 18
Gregory Nevano, Deputy Assistant Director, Illicit Trade, Travel,
and Finance Division, Homeland Security Investigations, U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Department of
Homeland Security.............................................. 20
Alphabetical List of Witnesses
Baldwin, Daniel D.:
Testimony.................................................... 18
Prepared statement........................................... 90
Cintron, Robert:
Testimony.................................................... 13
Prepared statement........................................... 69
Murphy, Joseph P.:
Testimony.................................................... 11
Prepared statement........................................... 65
Nevano, Gregory:
Testimony.................................................... 20
Prepared statement........................................... 96
Owen, Todd C.:
Testimony.................................................... 14
Prepared statement........................................... 75
Siemer, William:
Testimony.................................................... 16
Prepared statement........................................... 84
APPENDIX
Staff Report..................................................... 105
Exhibit A........................................................ 205
Statement from the National Treasury Employees Union............. 215
Responses to post-hearing questions for the Record from:
Mr. Murphy................................................... 219
Mr. Cintron.................................................. 223
Mr. Owen..................................................... 230
Mr. Siemer................................................... 267
Mr. Baldwin.................................................. 269
COMBATTING THE OPIOID CRISIS:
EXPLOITING VULNERABILITIES IN
INTERNATIONAL MAIL
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THURSDAY, JANUARY 25, 2018
U.S. Senate,
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations,
of the Committee on Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:03 a.m., in
room SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Rob Portman,
Chairman of the Subcommittee, presiding.
Present: Senators Portman, Lankford, Daines, Johnson,
Carper, Heitkamp, and Hassan.
Also present: Senator Klobuchar.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PORTMAN\1\
Senator Portman. This hearing will come to order.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Senator Portman appears in the
Appendix on page 55.
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Thank you all for being here. Today's hearing continues the
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations' work to combat the
opioid epidemic that is gripping our communities around the
country.
Last Congress, the Subcommittee issued a bipartisan report
on opioid-related fraud and abuse in the Medicare Part D
program. This Congress, the Subcommittee held a hearing on the
growing problem of individuals buying illicit opioids over the
Internet and shipping them to the United States through the
mail.
The opioid crisis, sadly, continues to get worse, not
better. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)
reported that more than 63,600 Americans died in 2016 from drug
overdoses. Indications are that number increased in 2017.
These overdose deaths are shocking. The number of deaths
continue to grow. My own home State of Ohio, we were told
recently, is now second in the country in terms of overdose
deaths.
It is heartbreaking, and increasingly, these overdoses are
due to a synthetic heroin, illegal versions of fentanyl, a drug
that is 50 to 100 times stronger than heroin. In fact, in Ohio,
fentanyl and its variations were involved in 60 percent of the
overdose deaths last year. It has become the number one killer
in Ohio.
The vast majority of illegal fentanyl is purchased online
from labs in China and then shipped to the United States
through the mail. We will hear from the Drug Enforcement Agency
(DEA) today about that, but I think it is shocking to people
when they find out that this is coming through our U.S. mail
system.
Last night, the Subcommittee released its bipartisan
report. I hope you all have seen it, how criminals exploit
vulnerabilities in international mail and use the U.S. Postal
Service (USPS) to ship illicit opioids into our country.
Without objection, I would move that the Subcommittee's
report be entered into the record.\1\
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\1\ The Subcommittee report appears in the Appendix on page 105.
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After our initial 2017 hearing, we set out to find out how
easy it is to purchase fentanyl online and how it was shipped
to the United States. What we discovered, of course, was it was
shockingly easy to do so. All you had to do was search
``fentanyl for sale.'' That simple search returned hundreds of
websites, many affiliated with Chinese labs, all openly
advertising illegal drugs.
The field was narrowed to just six websites, and we sent
emails asking basic questions about how to purchase and ship
fentanyl to the United States.
These online sellers were quick to respond, unafraid of
getting caught apparently, and ready to make a deal. You will
see that in the report. They offered discounts for bulk
purchases, even tried to up-sell us to carfentanil, a more
powerful synthetic heroin that is so strong, it is used as an
elephant tranquilizer.
Ordering these drugs was as easy as buying any other
product online. I must note our Subcommittee never completed a
purchase of drugs online. It was just too dangerous to risk
exposing someone to deadly fentanyl during delivery. But we did
use the online seller's payment information to determine if
others were buying, and of course, we found out they were. Just
from these six websites alone, we identified more than 500
payments to online sellers by more than 300 Americans, totaling
$230,000, most of which occurred over the last two years. This
is just a small sample, only six websites, and then, frankly,
we used just one payment system to be able to identify some of
these buyers.
The 300 people, by the way, were located in 43 different
States, with individuals from my home State of Ohio,
Pennsylvania, and Florida sending the most money to online
sellers.
The map that we have back here behind us shows the
concentration of where most of the purchases were made. That is
also in the report.
We also asked how the online sellers would ship the drugs
to us. Every single one of them preferred to use the U.S.
Postal Service. They did not want to use the private carriers
like Dalsey, Hillblom and Lynn (DHL), Federal Express (FedEx),
United Parcel Service (UPS). They wanted to use the Postal
Service. They told us they used the Postal Service because the
chances of the drugs getting seized were so insignificant that
delivery was essentially guaranteed.
We were also able to track hundreds of packages related to
these online purchases. We identified seven people out of the
300 who died from fentanyl-related overdoses after sending
money to and receiving packages from these online sellers.
One of these individuals who died was a 49-year-old Ohioan
from the Cleveland area who sent about $2,500 to an online
seller, received 15 packages through the Postal Service over a
10-month period. His autopsy confirmed that he died from acute
fentanyl intoxication just weeks after he received a package
from this online seller.
By analyzing more than 2 million lines of shipment data
obtained in our investigation, we located three individuals in
the United States who were likely distributing these drugs. We
identified more than 120 instances of different people sending
a payment to an online seller in China and then a day or two
later receiving a package from one single Pennsylvania address.
The person at this Pennsylvania address, by the way, was
working with the online seller to domestically transship drug
purchases.
Shipping data reviewed during the course of the
investigation also indicated other individuals who purchased
items to make pills, including pill presses, chemical bonding
agents, and empty pill casings. It is not surprising that
people are ordering fentanyl online to sell. The profit margins
are just staggering.
Based on DEA estimates, the street value of the online
transactions from just the six websites the Subcommittee
investigated translates to about $760 million in fentanyl pills
to sell on the streets of our communities.
We are already working with law enforcement authorities to
make sure these drug dealers can be brought to justice and will
continue to do so after this hearing.
But our findings today show the crucial role Advanced
Electronic Data (AED) can play in protecting our country and
fighting the opioid epidemic.
We also need some legislative changes. Last year, the
Postal Service only received advanced electronic data on about
36 percent of the more than 498 million international packages
coming into our country, so about 500 million packages a year
and only about 36 percent of them have the advanced electronic
data that allows law enforcement to identify these suspicious
packages. This means that about 318 million international
packages came here with no data; therefore, no ability for
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) or other law enforcement we
will hear from today to target these packages for screening.
We did not know with regard to 318 million packages who
sent it, where it was going, or what was in it, and this is a
massive loophole that is undermining the safety and security of
our country.
In addition, the data we do get from foreign posts that we
reviewed during our investigation appears to be of questionable
quality, so it is only 36 percent, but even much of that data
is not helpful. At times, the data was nothing more than
illogical lines of letters and characters entered by someone
who did not understand how to construct a standard American
address.
Even when CBP has the data and targets a package, the
Postal Service fails to locate it about 20 percent of the time.
Again, advanced electronic data, 36 percent, much of that data
is not very helpful, and even when law enforcement says, ``Aha.
We have a package here that looks like it is suspicious. We
would like to look at it,'' 20 percent of the time, they cannot
find the package. It gets through.
What we are left with is a Federal Government whose
policies and procedures are wholly inadequate to prevent the
use of international mail to ship illegal synthetic opioids
into the United States.
In contrast, our Postal Service provides data on about 90
percent of the packages that it ships to foreign posts. So
about 90 percent of what we send out, we do provide that
electronic data to foreign governments.
After September 11, 2001 and the terrorist attacks on that
day, collecting advanced electronic data was identified as a
national priority for all the right reasons.
In 2002, in fact, Congress required private carriers to
collect this data, so UPS, FedEx, DHL, and others were required
to collect it. It was left up to the discretion of the
Postmaster General and the Treasury Department with regard to
the Postal Service. They were encouraged to do it, encouraged
to study it, but it was left up to their discretion.
For more than a dozen years, nothing happened, essentially,
leaving Customs and Border Protection to manually inspect
targeted packages, which is the equivalent, of course, to
finding a needle in a haystack, again, now 500 million
packages. Then it was not that many, but hundreds of millions.
To their credit, the Postal Service and CBP started a pilot
program in late 2015 to target suspicious packages from China
using advanced electronic data, but our investigation found a
lack of planning, the different missions of the agencies, and
personality conflicts hampered the success even of the pilot
program that was started in 2015.
That pilot program, by the way, started at John F. Kennedy
(JFK) International Airport, and our investigators were able to
see that in action.
Despite these problems, the Postal Service's head of Global
Trade Compliance wrote that the pilot program allowed them to
``put a positive spin'' on stopping opioids.
While both CBP and the Postal Service agreed the pilot
should be rolled out to all international mail facilities, they
only started that after this Subcommittee held its May 2017
hearing. We are glad they did it. We are glad the hearing
encouraged them to do it.
We learned that this process was conveniently completed
just days in advance of this hearing, earlier this week. Again,
I think this hearing probably motivated some action, which is
good, but this should have been a priority without having to
hold this hearing. It should not take a congressional
investigation into the Postal Service and what is happening
with international mail to get our government to do its job.
One part of the solution is more data, and that is why we
have introduced the Synthetic Trafficking and Overdose
Prevention Act (STOP Act), which would require advanced
electronic data on international packages shipped through the
Postal Service.
We currently have 29 cosponsors on both sides of the aisle,
and I know this report and hearing will put pressure on us here
in the Senate to finally take some action.
I really want to thank Senator Carper and his staff for
working so closely with us on this investigation. There is a
lot more to be done to turn the tide of the opioid epidemic,
clearly, but stopping these deadly drugs from ever reaching our
streets is certainly a good start.
As the coauthor of the Comprehensive Addiction Recovery Act
(CARA), I have focused most of my career, actually over the
last 20-some years, on prevention, treatment, and longer-term
recovery. That is all important, but keeping this poison from
coming into our communities is something we can and should do.
Just in the past week near Toledo Ohio, five individuals
overdosed and three died, fentanyl-related overdoses. It is so
bad that officials issued an opioid advisory warning to the
public begging them to stay away from what was clearly a ``bad
batch of opioids'' in northwest Ohio.
How many more people have to die before this poison stops
coming into our communities, before we take the steps, the
simple steps, to at least understand where the suspicious
packages are and how to get them offline and not delivered to a
post office box here in America? How many people have to die
before this happens?
Yes, the Postal Service is in desperate need of
comprehensive reform, and nobody has been more involved with
that than Senator Carper, but it is shocking that we are still
so unprepared to police the mail arriving into our country.
Again, I want to thank Senator Carper and his staff for
working so closely with us.
The Chairman of the full Committee has now joined us,
Senator Johnson. I am going to ask him if he has any brief
opening remarks.
And I will turn it over to the Ranking Member, Senator
Carper.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CARPER\1\
Senator Carper. Thank you. I thank you, Mr. Chairman. I
want to thank you for your ongoing leadership on a really tough
issue and an important challenge facing our Nation, delighted
to be joined by our full Committee Chairman today too.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Senator Carper appears in the
Appendix on page 60.
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I want to thank our staffs, Democratic and Republican
staffs. There has been a fair amount of discussion of late
about how we do not work together on this issue. We work
together. We are one, and there is no space between us on this
issue, and frankly, on a lot of others.
I want to thank our witnesses for joining us today, for the
work that you do, and for the work that is done by the people
who are your colleagues.
This is an oversight hearing, but this is also a result of
an investigation. A big part of our job on the full Committee
is to do oversight, and broadly over the Federal Government,
this is oversight and investigation on something that we all
care deeply about.
No State has been immune to the damage that these drugs
have caused, including my home State of Delaware. I went to
Ohio State, Navy ROTC midshipman, I used to think Delaware was
a little town just north of Columbus, but it turned out to be a
whole State. I have been fortunate to be able to represent them
for a while.
But whether it is Delaware, Ohio or the State of Delaware,
this is an enormous challenge that we face, and it is an all-
hands-on-deck moment, and it requires an all-the-above
strategy. It is not enough just to deal with the symptoms of
the problems, and we will be talking a lot about that today--
but also the root cause of these problems. We have to do both.
According to the Division of Forensic Science in my State,
more and more Delawareans are dying from opioids every year. In
2014, we lost 222 people. In 2015, we lost 228 people. In 2016,
we lost 308 people. They are not just numbers. They are mothers
and fathers. They are brothers and sisters. They are sons and
daughters, aunts and uncles, grandparents, all the above.
Just last month, it was reported that emergency responders
in our largest county--we only have three, but our largest
county where my wife and I live, raised our family, in New
Castle County, were dispatched to a reported drug overdose
every 80 minutes. By early November of last year, paramedics
there had administered Naloxone, a drug that can block or
reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. They had
administered to nearly 600 patients.
All told, opioids are now the leading cause of drug
overdose deaths, killing more than 42,000 people nationwide in
2016.
Last year, our Subcommittee set out to learn what the
Federal Government is doing to stop these drugs from entering
our country.
In May, we heard testimony from officials from the Postal
Service, from Customs and Border Protection, from the State
Department in addition to several experts and first responders
on the ground in Ohio, Delaware, and elsewhere who grapple
every day with the impact opioids are having on our
communities. They told us how opioids are getting into our
communities through the mail and how they are working together
to stop that.
Unfortunately, I left that hearing very concerned that the
Federal response was proving to be insufficient. Our
investigation shows that progress has been made, but also that
we have much more to do. In fact, our findings are, in a word,
alarming.
We found that fentanyl and other even stronger synthetic
opioids are openly available for sale, as the Chairman has
said, on the Internet, accessible to anyone who knows how to
shop online. And once purchased, these drugs arrive primarily
from China through the international mail system. While sellers
often prefer the Postal Service, they offer shipment via
private carriers like DHL, like FedEx, and UPS.
Through our work, we obtained key payments and shipping
data that enabled staff to link online sellers to fentanyl-
related deaths and drug-related arrests all over the country.
We even found what appears to be a major opioid distributor in
Pennsylvania, where Delawareans reportedly get most of their
drugs.
It is CBP's mission in partnership with the Postal Service
and private shippers to keep these drugs from entering our
country. That mission has, unfortunately, become increasingly
more difficult as the number of inbound international packages
has skyrocketed.
I would like to say--I think the Chairman mentioned
``needle in a haystack.'' When you are looking for a needle in
a haystack, there is a couple of things we can do about it, and
one is make the needles bigger or make the haystacks smaller.
And we need to do both of those.
But for the Postal Service alone, volume has nearly
doubled, growing from about 150 million pieces in fiscal 2013
to nearly 500 million pieces in calendar year 2017.
Until recently, CBP was forced to sift through this massive
number of packages from the Postal Service manually. Today,
automation and the use of advanced electronic data has improved
the targeting of packages that may contain illicit items, but
the process is far from efficient and effective.
Our investigation revealed that a 2015 joint Postal
Service-CBP pilot project at JFK Airport suffered due to the
agencies' differing missions, a lack of coordination, and
several interagency conflicts. As a result, the pilot's full
expansion to our four other international mail processing
centers was delayed until just this week.
In addition, despite the massive amounts of drugs coming
into our country through the mail, the Postal Service and CBP
only target a small number of packages each day. Meanwhile, as
our report points out, our efforts to get CBP the data that it
needs to better target suspicious mail items and intercept
opioids and other contraband has also not kept pace with the
volume of drugs that cross our borders.
Unlike private carriers who control which packages enter
their networks and have more freedom to turn away problem
customers, the Postal Service is required to deliver all the
mail it receives from foreign posts. This is due to our
country's membership in the Universal Postal Union (UPU), an
international body that sets global mailing standards and
ensures that Americans can send mail to friends, to family, and
to business partners overseas.
The State Department represents the United States at the
UPU proceedings, and while the Postal Service has made some
progress in obtaining better information on packages through
bilateral agreements with foreign posts, the State Department
has watched for more than a decade now as some of our foreign
partners have successfully fought efforts requiring more
information on international packages.
Given the stakes, it is urgent that the Postal Service and
CBP work together to continue ramping up their targeting and
inspection efforts, and that the Postal Service and the State
Department speed up international efforts to get CBP the data
that it needs.
At the same time, those of us in Congress need to ensure
that the Postal Service has the resources that it needs to be a
stronger partner in these efforts.
As my colleagues are aware, protecting and improving the
mail system in this country has been one of my biggest
priorities on this Committee. The Postal Service is vital to
our economy, and as our work illustrates, it plays an important
role in our fight against the opioid epidemic as well, yet it
faces insolvency if the Congress does not pass comprehensive
postal reform this year. The enactment of this legislation will
free up billions of dollars that the Postal Service can use to
not only invest for the future, provide better service, but
also to shore up mail security.
All of that said, if we only focus on chasing drug
shipments after they have entered our mail system, we will only
address the symptoms of this problem. We also need to focus on
what I described earlier as the root causes. To truly do that,
we must address our country's considerable demand for drugs.
As we know, health care plays a vital role in combatting
the addiction that drives drug demand, and Medicaid is the
country's single largest payer for substance abuse disorder
services. Many States with the highest opioid overdose death
rates have used Medicaid to expand treatment access. Mine is
one; Ohio is another.
We need to focus even more on making sure that our health
care system has the resources that it needs to provide quality
treatment to those suffering from this epidemic.
And as we consider root causes, it is also clear that we
need to engage with China, the biggest source of illicit
opioids entering our country, in order to successfully disrupt
the supply of fentanyl and similar drugs.
We did something like this during the Obama Administration
through a high-level dialogue on cybersecurity and hacking, and
given the success that bilateral partnership had, this
administration should commit at higher levels to a similar
effort to tackle this urgent public health crisis.
With that in mind, I am reaching out to Terry Branstad as
our Ambassador to China, former Governor from Iowa--we served
together as Governors--to gauge the level of engagement of our
embassy and our team in China toward working with the Chinese
to say, ``Hey, this is a problem. It is not just a problem for
us, but someday, it is going to be a problem for you. And you
need to get your act together in order to help us but
ultimately to help you guys.''
This reminds me, Mr. Chairman, of the importance of
leadership in addressing complex challenges, like the ones we
are discussing today.
There is no silver bullet that can solve this problem, and
none of the agencies represented before us can do it alone. We
need leadership from the top.
Last March, the President established the commission
charged with studying the opioid epidemic and determining how
to fight it, and then in October, he officially declared the
crisis a public health emergency.
Despite these high-profile moves, news reports suggest that
only a few of the commission's 56 recommendations have
reportedly been implemented. We can do better than that.
Further, the Office of National Drug Control Policy
(ONDCP), the entity charged with coordinating the Federal
Government's counter-drug response still does not have a
permanent director. I will stay that again: still does not have
a permanent director.
Recent media reports indicate that the President's upcoming
budget will again propose a 95 percent cut in the budget of the
Office of National Drug Control Policy.
On a day when we are going to be critical of some front-
line agencies for what appears to be a lack of focus and a
sense of urgency about a real crisis, I think it is only fair
to call on the President for what appears to be a failure to
make that crisis the priority that it should be.
Let me just close with something we have in Delaware we
call the three C's: communicate, compromise, collaborate. And
we have added a fourth C, civility. That is something in short
supply around here but not on this Committee.
We need to embrace something like the three C's as we fight
this epidemic, and one of those is to communicate, and we are
doing that here today. Another is to collaborate with a little
bit of civility, and if we do that, we will make some progress,
and we certainly need to make that progress.
Again, I will close by saying this is an all-hands-on-deck
moment. This is an all-of-the-above strategy that is needed,
and as well as we do our jobs, we always know we can do better.
Our goal is perfection. We can do better here, and we need to
in the spirit of cooperation.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for your leadership.
Senator Portman. Thank you, Senator, Carper.
You mentioned the Christie commission, the Presidential
commission on opioids, and the recommendations, one of the
recommendations was enactment of the STOP Act that we talked
about earlier to require this electronic data in advance.
I have told my colleagues if you have a brief opening
statement, I am happy to have you be heard now. Thank you for
being here.
Mr. Chairman, do you have a statement?
OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN JOHNSON
Chairman Johnson. Thank you for your leadership on this.
I think you are aware that my own nephew died of an
overdose in January 2016. It has probably gotten to the point
where there are very few Americans that have not been touched
in a very personal way, pretty close connection with someone
who has died of some kind of overdose.
It is a very complex problem. I want to thank you and your
staff, who have done an excellent job preparing this hearing
and the briefing.
I want to thank the witnesses for your service to this
country.
It is complex. I think one of the things we do need to do,
in addition to what you are proposing here, is greater
information. I have a bill stopping overdoses of fentanyl
analogs. That is one of the real problems of scheduling these
minute differences in terms of analog drugs and immediately
scheduling those.
There are so many things we need to address here, but it
starts with identifying a problem, properly defining it, and
highlighting it in hearings like this.
So, again, I just want to thank everybody involved in this.
It is not easy, but these are tragedies, and we all have talked
to far too many parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters who
have lost their beautiful sons and daughters, grandsons,
granddaughters, brothers, and sisters. We have to do everything
we can.
Thank you for your leadership.
Senator Portman. Thank you for your passion and leadership.
To the panel, thank you very much for being here. We will
now turn to you. We have some real expertise here and some
great public servants to talk through this issue and figure out
how we begin to stop some of this poison coming into our
communities.
The first witness is Joseph Murphy. He is the U.S.
Government lead for International Postal policy issues, heads
the U.S. delegations to the meetings of the Universal Postal
Unions, Postal Operations Council (POC) that we have spoken
about previously. Mr. Murphy previously served for three years
as the U.S. Permanent Representative in the United Nations
office in Nairobi.
Second, Robert Cintron is with us. He was named Vice
President, Network Operations, in April 2016. In this position,
he oversees the Postal Service's distribution network,
including overall network design, policies, and programs for
processing sites, logistics that are required to move the mail,
and maintenance policies and programs to support that network.
Mr. Cintron began his postal career 33 years ago as a clerk in
Rochester, New York.
Third, we have Todd Owen, who is the Assistant
Commissioner, Office of Field Operations (OFO), Customs and
Border Protection. He was named to that position in 2015. He
oversees more than 29,000 employees, including more than 24,000
CBP officers and CBP agriculture specialists. He manages
operations of CBP's ports of entry (POE) and numerous programs
that support national security. Mr. Owen began his career with
the U.S. Customs Service in 1990 as an import specialist in
Cleveland, Ohio, a great start.
William Siemer is with us. He currently serves as the
Acting Deputy Inspector General (IG) for the Postal Service's
Office of Inspector General (OIG). He joined the Inspector
General's office in 2003. He previously served in both the
United States Secret Service and in the Air Force Office of
Special Investigations as a special agent.
Daniel Baldwin currently serves as a section chief within
the Drug Enforcement Administration's Office of Global
Enforcement. In this role, he supports DEA's global drug
enforcement efforts in Africa and Asia. Prior to this
assignment, Mr. Baldwin served as DEA's country attache in
Beijing, China, so he has good experience in China. In 1991, he
received his bachelor of science degree in criminal justice
from the University of Denver.
Finally, Gregory Nevano is with us. Gregory serves as the
Deputy Assistant Director for the Illicit Trade, Travel, and
Finance Division within Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).
Mr. Nevano has oversight of all financial, narcotics,
documents, and benefit fraud, criminal gang exploitation, as
well as several targeting infusion centers. Prior to this
assignment, Mr. Nevano served as Chief of Staff to the Deputy
Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and
has served in various key management positions within the
agency.
Gentlemen, under the rules of this Committee, we swear in
all of our witnesses. At this time, I would ask you to please
stand and raise your right hand.
Do you swear the testimony you give before this Committee
will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,
so help you, God?
Mr. Murphy. I do.
Mr. Cintron. I do.
Mr. Owen. I do.
Mr. Siemer. I do.
Mr. Baldwin. I do.
Mr. Nevano. I do.
Senator Portman. Let the record reflect that all witnesses
answered in the affirmative.
All of your written testimonies, gentlemen, will be placed
in the record in its entirety, so I would ask you to limit your
prepared remarks here this morning, your oral testimony, to 5
minutes.
And, Mr. Murphy, we will start with you.
TESTIMONY OF JOSEPH P. MURPHY,\1\ CHIEF, INTERNATIONAL POSTAL
AFFAIRS, OFFICE OF SPECIALIZED AND TECHNICAL AGENCIES, BUREAU
OF INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Mr. Murphy. Thank you, Sir. Chairman Portman, Ranking
Member Carper, Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the
invitation to appear before you today to discuss our efforts to
increase the availability of advanced electronic data for
international mail items.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Murphy appears in the Appendix on
page 65.
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The Universal Postal Union, is the principal international
venue where the Department of State discharges its
responsibilities related to international postal policy. My
remarks will center on efforts under way within that body to
expand the exchange of advanced electronic data.
These efforts have a long history, a key moment of which
was the decision of the UPU's 2012 Congress to amend the UPU
convention to require countries and their designated postal
operators to adopt and implement security strategies that
include the principle of complying with requirements for
providing electronic advance data.
Developing the implementation measures for this amendment
has been a top priority for U.S. delegations at UPU meetings
ever since. Our efforts, which include many hours of work by
colleagues at USPS and the Department of Homeland Security, are
now bearing fruit, and there has been recent rapid progress on
this front.
In February 2016, the UPU's Postal Operations Council
adopted regulations for the 2012 convention amendment and also
a roadmap for the implementation of those regulations. The
United States co-chairs with India the Postal Operations
Council committee that oversees much of the work required to
reach the roadmap's milestones. These milestones include final
adoption of the technical messaging standard for item-level
data, and the POC met this goal when it approved an item
attribute message standard at its most recent meeting last
October. In combination, these two developments--the regulation
and the standard--enabled UPU member countries to impose
requirements for AED. UPU members must do so, however, in a
manner that is consistent with the real-world capability of the
global postal network.
Accordingly, the focus is now on building capacity. At the
global level, this entails building out other elements of the
UPU's messaging and data flows. This work is progressing well
but will only have utility if postal operators develop the
capability to collect the data and to use the tools available
to them.
The needed investment in skills and technology is
happening, and it is being greatly accelerated by a sea change
in attitudes among the UPU membership, which has come to
understand that AED and other related data management and
communications tools are essential to the future of the postal
sector.
Consequently, members have endorsed several initiatives
aimed at positioning postal operators in developing countries
to exchange AED.
For example, over half of the UPU's development and
cooperation budget for the 2017-2020 period is devoted to a
project that aims to make postal services in developing
countries operationally ready for e-commerce.
This project has as one of its key performance indicators
the goal of supporting 80 postal operators to be exchanging AED
for some portion of their flow by the end of 2020.
In addition, the UPU is also implementing a second project
focused narrowly on security, with an emphasis on capturing and
transmitting AED. Participants in this project, all developing
countries, are self-funding with money that was held in trust
for them by the UPU.
The Integrated Product Plan (IPP), which the most recent
UPU Congress adopted in October 2016, with strong U.S. support,
will also help accelerate AED exchange. The IPP's goal is to
modernize the UPU's product offerings to better----
Senator Carper. Can I ask a favor?
Mr. Murphy. Yes.
Senator Carper. I am not very good on acronyms. UPS, I am
pretty good on that. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),
I am pretty good on that. Do not use so many acronyms. Actually
say the words.
Mr. Murphy. Yes, sir. All right.
Senator Carper. That would be an admonition for everybody
else as well, OK?
Mr. Murphy. The Integrated Product Plan----
Senator Portman. Within your 5 minutes.
Mr. Murphy. What?
Senator Portman. Within your 5 minutes. [Laughter.]
Universal Postal Union.
Mr. Murphy. The Integrated Product--can I use UPU?
Senator Portman. All right.
Mr. Murphy. OK.
The Integrated Product Plan's goal is to modernize the
UPU's product offerings to better meet the changing needs of
customers and supply chain partners, including customs
authorities. Phase 1, which commenced on January 1 of this
year, facilitates the exchange of AED since one of its
provisions is a requirement for mail items containing goods to
have a UPU standard bar code label.
Important work is being done, but there is more to do, as
Senator Carper mentioned in his opening statement. Although the
UPU has the stated goal of having all postal services with the
ability to exchange item-level data by the end of 2020, there
is a difference between the technical ability to exchange data
and the realized ability to collect and enter it.
There are many challenges, but we are optimistic and
encouraged to see that there is real rapid progress at the
country and the global levels. Although the work of enabling
all countries to comprehensively exchange the full range of AED
is a long-term undertaking, we are confident that by 2020, the
United States will be receiving AED for most of the mail
entering the country.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I look forward to answering your
questions and those of other Members of the Subcommittee.
Senator Portman. Thank you, Mr. Murphy. Mr. Cintron.
TESTIMONY OF ROBERT CINTRON,\1\ VICE PRESIDENT, NETWORK
OPERATIONS, UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE; ACCOMPANIED BY GUY
COTTRELL, CHIEF POSTAL INSPECTOR, UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE
Mr. Cintron. OK. Good morning, Chairman Portman, Ranking
Member Carper, and Members of the Subcommittee. Thank you,
Chairman Portman, for calling this hearing.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Cintron appears in the Appendix
on page 69.
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My name is Robert Cintron. I am the Vice President, Network
Operations, for the United States Postal Service. I oversee the
Postal Service's national distribution network, including its
operations at the International Service Centers (ISCs).
Last May, I testified before this Subcommittee on our
effort to combat opioids in the mail, highlighting the
collection and receipt of advanced electronic data. Together
with our Federal agency partners, we are committed to
aggressively an increasing AED for packages coming into the
United States in order to improve the targeting of illicit
drugs and other contraband.
In the past 3 years, the Postal Service has gone from
receiving almost no AED on inbound shipments to receiving more
than 40 percent, as of December 2017. We are now testing data
that will allow us to target more package volume from China.
This data will result in a significant increase in the amount
of AED the Postal Service receives by the end of 2018.
Since January 2017, the number of countries sending AED to
the Postal Service has grown from 8 to 23, and includes China
and other countries of interest. We have prioritized obtaining
AED from the largest volume foreign postal operators (FPOs),
which collectively account for over 90 percent of all inbound
volume.
We now require AED on packages where rates are established
under bilaterally negotiated arrangements. We currently have
bilateral agreements in place with postal operators in
Australia, Canada, China, Hong Kong, and Korea.
Additionally, other foreign posts have entered into
voluntary data sharing agreements (DSAs) to facilitate the
exchange of AED, bringing the total to 56 countries. While the
Postal Service and CBP have distinct responsibilities at ISCs,
these responsibilities complement our shared goal of fighting
the importation of synthetic opioids.
In September, the Postal Service and CBP completed a
memorandum of understanding (MOU) to solidify our interagency
partnership. Additionally, the program initiated at the New
York ISC to use inbound AED to facilitate more advance
targeting by CBP has been expanded to all ISCs.
Over the last 6 months, the Postal Service has provided
hundreds of thousands of records per day to CBP and expanded
the number of countries and types of packages available for
targeting.
We have also implemented an automated process to identify
targeted pieces requested by CBP. Additionally, we provided
further training to ISC employees to reinforce proper
processes, for handling and presenting mail in accordance with
CBP requirements. As the Postal Service continues to advance
mail-sorting technology, these successes will grow.
To further improve the Federal Government's coordination of
oversight over inbound international items, the Postal Service,
CBP, and the FDA formalized an interagency work group. The
group is working on efforts to build capacity to provide AED,
develop detection technology, continue information sharing,
provide technical assistance for legislation, and improve
physical and information technology (IT) infrastructure.
We also continue to work in close collaboration with our
law enforcement branch, the Inspection Service, which has seen
significant improvements in its ability to seize fentanyl and
synthetic opioids.
From fiscal year (FY) 2016 through fiscal year 2017, the
Inspection Service achieved a 375 percent increase in
international parcel seizures and an 880 percent increase in
domestic parcel seizures related to opioids.
In conclusion, we share your concerns about illegal drugs
and contraband entering the country through the mail and
commercial carriers. The Postal Service is committed to taking
all practical measures to ensure our Nation's mail security and
provide the American public the best, most efficient service
possible.
Again, thank you for this opportunity to testify, and I
look forward to your questions.
Senator Portman. Thank you, Mr. Cintron. Mr. Owen.
TESTIMONY OF TODD C. OWEN,\1\ EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT COMMISSIONER,
OFFICE OF FIELD OPERATIONS, U.S. CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION,
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
Mr. Owen. Chairman Portman, Ranking Member Carper,
distinguished Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the
opportunity to appear today to discuss the role of U.S. Customs
and Border Protection in combatting the flow of dangerous
illicit drugs into our country.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Owen appears in the Appendix on
page 75.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
As the unified border security agency of the United States,
CBP plays a critical role in our Nation's efforts to keep
dangerous drugs from entering our communities. CBP interdicts
drugs and other dangerous items at our ports of entry,
including multiple mail and express courier facilities, by
leveraging advanced electronic data, automated targeting
systems and intelligent-driven strategies, and by using various
types of detection technology, all as part of our multilayered
risk-based approach to enhance the security of our borders.
Since I last appeared before this full Committee in April
2016, CBP, working collaboratively with the Postal Service and
our law enforcement partners, has made strong progress in
enhancing our enforcement capabilities and our effectiveness in
the international mail and express courier environments, but
more must be done.
Recent bilateral agreements regarding advanced electronic
data between the U.S. Postal Service and foreign postal
operators have increased CBP's ability to target high-risk
shipments.
In April 2006, CBP was receiving advanced electronic data
on a limited basis from only eight countries. Today, we are
receiving advanced electronic data from 23 countries, with
another six countries in testing. Currently, CBP receives AED
on over 40 percent of all international mail shipments with
goods, and work continues internationally to increase the
volume and the accuracy of the AED provided to the Postal
Service.
As the Chairman acknowledged, the CBP has initiated pilot
programs in the five mail gateways. Through these pilots, CBP
has enhanced our automated targeting capabilities and has
worked with the postal service to develop protocols to ensure
that every shipment selected by CBP for examination is, in
fact, presented for inspection.
Last summer, CBP and the Postal Service signed a memorandum
of understanding aimed at increasing the level of advanced
electronic data while aligning inspection processes.
In the past year, CBP has increased our staffing at the six
main international mail facilities by 20 percent, and all CBP
narcotic detection canines assigned to the mail facilities,
express courier operations, and international airports have now
been trained to detect fentanyl, adding another detection
capability at our ports of entry.
Once detected, these substances must be positively
identified. In the past 18 months, CBP has deployed
identification testing equipment so that officers can quickly
determine what the unknown substances are. The average fentanyl
seizure in the international mail enforcement is only 700 grams
and arrives as an unknown powder. CBP officers must have the
technology enabling them to quickly and safety identify these
unknown substances.
CBP has increased the availability of such testing
equipment and is appreciative to Congress for the recently
passed INTERDICT Act, which will allow us to add testing
equipment and further strengthen our enforcement efforts.
In the mail and express courier environments, the fentanyl
detected primarily arrives from China and is over 90 percent
pure. CBP has deployed the necessary personal protective
equipment to safely inspect and process these narcotics.
We have also deployed Naloxone or Narcan to our ports of
entry so if our officers or our canines are accidentally
exposed to these deadly substances, we can quickly administer
these treatments to save their lives.
And last, substantive and timely information sharing is
critical to the targeting and interdicting shipments containing
illicit drugs. CBP's National Targeting Center (NTC)
collaborates with critical partners on a daily basis, including
HSI, the DEA, FBI, members of the intelligence community (IC),
and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS). These
investigative relationships are critical in delivering
consequences to those trying to smuggle narcotics across our
border.
In closing, we are seeing an increase in interdiction as a
result of the efforts that I have outlined. In fiscal year
2015, CBP seized 50 pounds of fentanyl in the international
mail and express courier environments. In 2016, 81 pounds of
fentanyl were seized, and in fiscal year 2017, 335 pounds were
seized. Already this fiscal year at our largest international
mail facility at JFK Airport, CBP officers have made more
fentanyl seizures in the first 3\1/2\ months than they have in
all of last year.
Despite the success, much more still must be done. We must
continue to increase the level and accuracy of the advanced
electronic data being provided. We must further refine our
targeting capabilities while working with the Postal Service to
ensure that every parcel selected for examination is presented
to CBP.
We must find a technological solution which can quickly
examine parcels for the presence of contraband without having
to open the packages, and we must work with our law enforcement
partners to identify and dismantle those criminal networks
bringing these illicit narcotics into our communities and
ensure criminal prosecution.
Chairman Portman, Ranking Member Carper, distinguished
Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to
testify today. I look forward to your questions.
Senator Portman. Thank you, Mr. Owen. Mr. Siemer.
TESTIMONY OF WILLIAM SIEMER,\1\ ACTING DEPUTY INSPECTOR
GENERAL, OFFICE OF INSPECTOR GENERAL, UNITED STATES POSTAL
SERVICE
Mr. Siemer. Good morning, Chairman Portman, Ranking Member
Carper, Chairman Johnson, and Members of the Subcommittee.
Thank you for inviting me to discuss our work on international
mail security and keeping illicit drugs out of the mail.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Siemer appears in the Appendix on
page 84.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
As background, our organization has conducted substantial
audit work on inbound international mail operations and
security. We have issued eight reports since September 2015 and
made 21 recommendations to the Postal Service covering areas
such as enhancing systems and processes, providing better
employee training and oversight, and improving coordination
with CBP, other agencies, and foreign posts.
The Postal Service agreed with 18 of the recommendations
and has already addressed 12 of them.
We also have two ongoing projects focused on advanced
electronic data and opioid safety preparedness at the Postal
Service.
In addition to this audit work, we are building our data
analytics capacity to find and prevent drug trafficking through
the mail. For years, law enforcement has used data to find
criminals and expose their networks. Early efforts focused on
financial crime due to its complexity and large datasets
available. And just as criminals misused financial institutions
to commit fraud, today's drug traffickers are misusing the U.S.
mail to anonymously exchange money and deliver illegal drugs.
The Postal Service faces a number of challenges that
private companies do not when dealing with illicit narcotics in
the mail. For instance, the Postal Service is obligated to
deliver international parcels, even though it did not
originally receive them from the customers. The Postal Service
receives limited electronic data about many of these parcels,
and the information it does receive is often incomplete or
inaccurate.
In addition, the sheer volume of inbound parcels the Postal
Service handles far exceeds what other shippers manage.
And finally, unlike private shippers, the law requires the
Postal Service to obtain a warrant to inspect the contents of
suspect parcels. The sanctity and privacy of the mail and its
contents is a strong principle valued by the American public,
but this principle is being exploited by the criminals.
As e-commerce continues to expand dramatically, rapid
growth of both domestic and international mail parcels is also
occurring. The Postal Service must rely heavily on automation
and electronic data to deliver more than 5 billion parcels a
year to 157 million delivery points. That is more than 14
million parcels a day, and it is easy for illegal drug parcels
to hide in all of that traffic.
However, the data that the Postal Service uses to manage
its network can also be used to sniff out suspicious parcels,
and that is exactly what we have begun doing.
This past September, our Acting Inspector General testified
before the House about some of our work in this area. She
described a case involving an international parcel containing
fentanyl seized by CBP in New York. The investigation
ultimately uncovered a postal employee who was facilitating the
delivery of illicit narcotics in Florida. Our analytics work on
the seized fentanyl parcel identified nearly 2,800 additional
suspicious parcels that were also sent through the mail.
Since that time, we have assisted other Federal
investigations involving reshipping schemes and illicit
international narcotics parcels. We identified a number of
additional reshippers who were previously unknown to law
enforcement and who were responsible for thousands of
suspicious shipments.
While supporting individual cases is useful, we are also
dedicating resources to build tools to address narcotics issues
more broadly. We recently completed the development of a tool
to identify postal employees who may be stealing drug parcels
from the mail or facilitating the delivery of drug parcels to
criminal groups.
Unlike legitimate customers who will tell us when their
parcels do not arrive, we have yet to receive our first
complaint from a drug dealer that their parcel was missing.
Historically, we have had to rely on tips or cooperating
defendants to provide us with information about postal
employees who were assisting drug traffickers. Now we are
analyzing Postal Service data and looking for various
indicators to help us focus on carriers or routes where
suspicious parcels are disappearing. Our initial use of this
analytics tool has been very encouraging, and it may
revolutionize the way we tackle these kinds of crimes.
We are also currently building a tool to identify inbound
international parcels that are suspicious but have not yet
arrived in the United States. Our hope is that we can share the
insights gained from this tool with CBP to better assist
efforts to identify shipments for inspection and reduce the
number of narcotics parcels that enter the mail stream. We have
shared some initial parcel information to test the accuracy of
our model, and the results appear very promising.
Combatting the shipment of illegal drugs is not a problem
any one agency can solve by itself. Cross-agency collaboration
and data sharing is critical. Ultimately, we need to identify
and intercept these parcels before they are delivered, rather
than continuing to focus on investigating after the fact.
One part of the solution is using data effectively to
uncover problems, but that is only half the battle. Resources
to address the problems are also needed. For example, our tool
to identify collusive employees identified hundreds of
suspicious postal routes. Our agency is not staffed to address
all of these investigations immediately, and the challenge is
only going to get worse as our budget gets smaller.
This challenge is not unique to our organization, but it
highlights the need to strategically invest in the tools and
people to combat this problem, since data alone is not enough.
Yet, if we are successful, data analytics holds great promise
to help government and law enforcement focus on the areas of
greatest impact.
Thank you for the opportunity to discuss our work, and I am
happy to answer any questions.
Senator Portman. Mr. Baldwin.
TESTIMONY OF DANIEL D. BALDWIN,\1\ SECTION CHIEF, OFFICE OF
GLOBAL ENFORCEMENT, DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATION, U.S.
DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
Mr. Baldwin. Good morning, Chairman Johnson, Chairman
Portman, Ranking Member Carper, and other Members of the
Subcommittee. My name is Dan Baldwin. I am a special agent with
the Drug Enforcement Administration, currently assigned to DEA
headquarters where I provide operational support to offices in
Asia and Africa. Prior to this, I was the country attache for
the DEA office in Beijing, China.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Baldwin appears in the Appendix
on page 90.
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It is an honor to be here today to speak with you about
international cooperation and DEA's enforcement efforts to
combat the opioid crisis.
In addition to my written remarks, there are two things I
would like to touch on this morning, the enormity of the
problem and what we are doing to address the threat; first, the
problem. Over the last several years, DEA has encountered a
dangerous new trend--the convergence of the opioid epidemic and
the synthetic drug threat from China.
In 2016 alone, 42,000 Americans lost their lives due to an
opioid overdose. We all likely know someone who has been
affected. This is a national threat and public health emergency
fueled by fentanyl, which is cheap to make, hard to detect, and
dangerously potent. A kilogram of fentanyl can be purchased for
less than $5,000, and the potential profits from the sale of
that kilo can exceed $1.5 million.
It is often smuggled across the U.S.-Mexican border or sent
directly to the United States via postal or express mail from
China. It is found in heroin, counterfeit prescription drugs,
and other illicit substances.
Two milligrams of this substance is potentially deadly.
Oftentimes users do not even know they are taking this lethal
drug.
This leads me to my second point--countering the threat.
DEA's mission is to disrupt and dismantle the highest-priority
drug-trafficking threats to the United States. For decades, we
have maintained a worldwide presence to take the fight to the
source, and in this case, China is the primary source of both
fentanyl and the precursors used to make it.
Over the past decade, our relationship with China has
progressed. As recently as three years ago, many of the
synthetic drugs we were encountering in the United States were
not controlled in China, and they had no legal authority to
assist us in our investigations. However, through continued
engagement by DEA and the Department of Justice (DOJ),
highlighting this deficiency, additional legislation was passed
in 2015, which improved their ability to more effectively
control newly identified harmful substances.
China has now controlled 10 fentanyl class substances and
116 other new psychoactive substances. The U.S. seizure data
shows us that Chinese control has an immediate effect on the
availability of these drugs in the United States.
We are also encouraged by recent discussions with Chinese
drug control officials and the prospect of scheduling fentanyl
as a class. This would eliminate the need to control fentanyl-
related substances one by one.
U.S.-China collaboration on investigations has also seen
some improvement. Of note, in 2017, the Department of Justice
indicted two Chinese nationals responsible for manufacturing
and distributing illicit fentanyl in the United States. These
individuals have been designated as consolidated priority
organization targets, which are deemed the most significant
drug traffickers by the Department of Justice.
In the United States, the DEA and the U.S. interagency
utilized coordination and deconfliction center, such as DEA
Special Operations Division (SOD) and CBP's National Targeting
Center, to enhance investigations and the sharing of
information. One outcome of this enhanced collaboration was the
recent takedown of AlphaBay in 2017, one of the largest known
dark-net markets facilitating the purchase of illicit fentanyl.
Going forward, the DEA anticipates the opening of the
office in Guangzhou, China later this year. This office will
facilitate greater collaboration with law enforcement
counterparts along China's Southern Border, where fentanyl and
other illicit drugs leave China en route to the United States.
DEA has seen some progress working with our Chinese
counterparts, and we are hopeful that this relationship will
continue to improve and develop.
Here in the United States, the DEA and the law enforcement
partners represented here at the table will continue our
collaboration. We are passionate about our cause and driven by
those families and individuals that have been directly impacted
by this crisis.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify before your
Committee on this important issue, and I look forward to your
questions.
Senator Portman. Thank you, Mr. Baldwin. Mr. Nevano.
TESTIMONY OF GREGORY NEVANO,\1\ DEPUTY ASSISTANT DIRECTOR,
ILLICIT TRADE, TRAVEL, AND FINANCE DIVISION, HOMELAND SECURITY
INVESTIGATIONS, U.S. IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT, U.S.
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
Mr. Nevano. Good morning, Chairman Portman, Chairman
Johnson, Ranking Member Carper, and distinguished Members.
Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to
discuss the opioid crisis in the United States and the efforts
of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Homeland Security
investigations to disrupt, dismantle, and bring to justice the
criminal elements responsible for manufacturing, smuggling, and
the distribution of dangerous opioids.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Nevano appears in the Appendix on
page 96.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
As the largest investigative agency within the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security, ICE Homeland Security
Investigations investigates and enforces more than 400 Federal
criminal statutes. ICE special agents use their authority to
investigate all types of cross-border activity and work in
close collaboration with U.S. Customs and Border Protection,
the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the United States
Postal Inspection Service in a unified effort with both
domestic and international law enforcement partners to target
transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) that are supplying
dangerous opioids to the United States.
Today, I would like to highlight our efforts to combat
international shipments of opioids, specifically fentanyl,
coming into the United States through international mail
facilities.
Based on investigative efforts, United States law
enforcement has identified China as a primary source of the
U.S. illicit opioid threat, illicit fentanyl. Fentanyl analogs
and their immediate precursors are most often produced in
China. From China, these substances are shipped primarily
through mail carriers directly to the United States or
alternatively shipped directly to TCOs in Mexico.
Once in the Western Hemisphere, fentanyl or its analogs are
prepared and mixed into the U.S. heroin supply domestically or
pressed into pill form and then moved to the illicit U.S.
market where demand for prescription opioids and heroin remains
at epidemic proportions.
Mexican transnational criminal organizations also receive
shipments of fentanyl and its precursors directly from China to
supply the illicit U.S. market. These sophisticated
transnational criminal organizations utilize existing smuggling
routes and the U.S.-based infrastructure to get fentanyl to the
end users. Though fentanyl seizures made at land border ports
of entry are higher in number and more voluminous, fentanyl
seizures from mail facilities are higher in purity levels and
are often unadulterated. The majority of fentanyl in the
international mail environment is shipped in purity
concentrations of over 90 percent, whereas the majority of
fentanyl in the land border environment is seized in purity
concentrations of less than 10 percent.
Purchasers can access open source and dark-net marketplaces
to easily purchase illicit opioids like fentanyl online and
have it shipped directly to their homes in the United States,
no differently than any other e-commerce commodity.
Trans-national criminal organizations recognize the
vulnerability of the mail system and exploit the great volumes
of mail transiting into the United States as a means to further
their criminal activity. Recognizing the need to proactively
target online fentanyl trafficking, the ICE Cyber Crime Center
is identifying ongoing investigations facilitating the
coordination of online undercover investigations.
ICE is fully engaged with the DEA Special Operations
Division, the CBP National Targeting Center, to identify
shipment routes, to target parcels that may contain illicit
opioids, precursors, and manufacturing materials, and to fully
exploit financial and investigative intelligence.
Our Border Enforcement Security Taskforces (BEST), are
ICE's primary platform to investigate opioid smuggling. ICE
currently operates BEST in 57 locations throughout the United
States.
In response to the opioid crisis, ICE, with significant
participation from our colleagues at Customs and Border
Protection, established a BEST in Memphis, Tennessee, which is
embedded at an international mail and express consignment
facility. The Memphis BEST targets opioid shipments on a daily
basis and engages in control deliveries of seized illicit
parcels as an effective means to identify end users and
ultimately disrupt and dismantle regional smugglers. ICE will
continue to expand the BEST platform to enhance our nationwide
effort to interdict illicit opioids transiting through the mail
system.
ICE has made significant strides in fiscal year 2017 in
combatting the fentanyl epidemic in the United States, as
evidenced by a 400 percent increase in fentanyl-related
seizures. However, even with these advances, there is no single
solution or government entity that can stop the flow of
dangerous and illicit opioids like fentanyl into the United
States or keep them from harming the American public.
Tackling this complex threat involves a united,
comprehensive, and aggressive approach across law enforcement
interagency lines in collaboration with experts in the medical,
science, and public health communities. ICE will continue to
work with our Federal, State, and local partners to improve the
efficiency of information sharing and operational coordination
to address the challenges and threats posed by illicit
narcotics smuggling in the international mail environment.
In closing, I would like to thank you for the opportunity
to appear before you today, and I look forward to answering
your questions. Thank you.
Senator Portman. Thank you, Mr. Nevano, and thank you to
all the witnesses.
We are going to have lots of questions for you. We have a
number of Senators who are here who are not going to be able to
stay for the entire time. I will be here for the entire time,
so I am going to be very brief and then turn it over to them
and have an opportunity to ask more of my questions later.
But let me just say, to summarize what you are saying, Mr.
Nevano talked about the need for this to be an aggressive
approach, and I must say I have not seen the urgency over the
past many years. We have talked about the State Department for
10 years now, we have been talking about this with our
international partners, and we have evidence that we were able
to uncover in our investigation that it is still not going at
the rate we would like. We can talk about that later. I will
read you some of the emails talking about how we slowed to a
crawl in our efforts, as an example.
We know that there are over 300 million packages coming
here without any data, and Mr. Owen has just told us he needs
that data to be able to identify those packages. That was his
number one thing he is looking to do to be able to stop it.
My questions will be along those lines, just to give you
the opportunity to think about it, and with that, I will turn
it over to the Ranking Member, and we will give everybody an
opportunity to ask questions. We will have as many rounds as we
need to be able to get all the information out today.
Thank you.
Senator Carper. Thanks. Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
Let me ask. Anybody here that has some urgency to be in two
places at once, you would like to go ahead? No?
Senator Lankford. I will at 11:15.
Senator Carper. Go ahead.
Senator Lankford. It is all right with the Chair? Thank
you.
Senator Portman. Senator Lankford, who was here first.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LANKFORD
Senator Lankford. Gentlemen, I appreciate it very much,
being here and for your testimony. Let me run through a couple
different questions to be able to get some clarity on this.
Mr. Murphy, you had mentioned by the end of 2020, the
advanced electronic data, we should be capable of gathering
that, but then you hesitated and said just because we are
capable does not mean we are actually doing it, so help me
understand the next level of that. When are we--not just
capable by the end of 2020, when are we actually gathering that
data?
Mr. Murphy. Thank you, Senator. That is correct. What is
happening in the UPU context is the tools are being put into
place, and capacity is being built so that countries have the
ability, if they have the data, to send and receive it.
But the bottleneck is at the country level, is in
collecting the data and entering it, and----
Senator Lankford. What is the timeframe for that?
Mr. Murphy. Well, that is yet to be determined.
Senator Lankford. Is that 2025? Is that 2030? Help me
understand that.
Mr. Murphy. Well, countries are going to begin deploying
requirements for AED, as they are now entitled to do. Those
requirements need to be calibrated to the capabilities of the
sending countries, but it is going to be a driver of further
deployment. So there is not at this point a firm deadline by
which every country must be able to send AED for all----
Senator Lankford. The deadline is the capability by 2020
but no deadline for when they actually have to do it?
Mr. Murphy. There is no deadline established at this time,
Senator.
Senator Lankford. How do we get that?
Mr. Murphy. I think we need to be guided by our own
information needs as we assess what it is we want to ask for
and then tailor our requests around the capabilities of
partners to ensure that we get Customs and Border Protection
the information they are looking for in a timely way.
Senator Lankford. Thank you.
Mr. Baldwin and Mr. Nevano, this is a question for either
of you. I am trying to work through the process of not just
picking up not only the seller, which is exceptionally
important to this, but also the buyer that this is headed
toward. How do you start to be able to break out and say this
is a very small amount of fentanyl, looks like a user, versus
this is a larger amount and we need to track not only who the
seller is but also who the buyer is because this could also be
a street distributor as well? How do you balance that out, and
how do you mean to work through the process of not only the
interdiction but then the enforcement aspect?
Mr. Baldwin. Senator, thank you for your question.
In regards to identifying the different players in this
process, we have our offices overseas that are working directly
within the supply chain as far as the supply from China. We
work here in the United States, and we have our agents
identifying leads, either from CBP or Postal or from our own
investigations. We then are providing those back to China. So
we are identifying the entire chain.
Of course, the goal is to identify the largest-level
suppliers, the suppliers from China, so that if we have an
individual who is sending multiple thousands of packages, that
makes the work down at the end of the table much easier by
eliminating the one shipment.
Senator Lankford. It would seem like you would have--if
they have ordering it online, you have got an Internet Protocol
(IP) address. You probably have a city location or a region
that this package is actually coming from when it was dropped
off. There seems like there would be multiple markers--the
financial transaction that occurs when the exchange happens. It
seems like you would be able to narrow the focus somewhat of
where it is coming from, but certainly you have the address of
the person that is purchasing it here because that is where it
is being delivered to.
Mr. Nevano. Senator, you hit on how I was going to respond.
Relationships with financial institutions is key in being
able to track the financial transactions, both on the receiving
and the sending end. We have established relationships with
financial institutions that allow us to track the flow of the
funds going from the purchaser to the person on the other end
who is actually selling the illicit opioids, so that is key in
our investigations.
Senator Lankford. Do we have any incentives for other
nations to be able to cooperate with us when we are trying to
interdict this? I mean, it is millions and millions of dollars,
obviously, that are in the transaction at times, and certainly
for the larger dealers. Is there any incentive for those other
nations to cooperate with us to be able to share that
information?
Mr. Nevano. I would defer partly to that to DEA, but from
the HSI perspective, Senator, we have tried to establish
relationships in foreign countries with intelligence sharing
and working with our law enforcement partners to establish
mutual relationships to show the benefit of how establishing
these relationships can interdict a package before it comes
into the United States, and that is ultimately what our goal
is. If we can push the borders further out to not have the
package come into the United States, that would be our goal.
Mr. Baldwin. And just to follow up, Senator, to add some
more to that answer, at least China has an interest in working
with us to try to address some of the stuff coming out of
China. There is a potential that these drugs certainly could be
used by their own people.
Senator Lankford. Right.
Mr. Baldwin. They are not necessarily seeing that right
now, but they certainly are recognizing the potential of that.
We have certain mechanisms within DEA and with the
Department of Justice where we are engaging them on a regular
basis to assist us in getting them to help us with this
problem. Those are things we work on, on a daily basis and
annually. We have meetings to try to push our asks to the
Chinese in order to get them to come to the table to do more in
regards to addressing this, these substances coming out of
China.
Senator Lankford. Can I switch countries for your real
quick? Mexico, you have mentioned a couple of times as well
that the precursors are actually coming to Mexico, but we also
have Mexican production facilities now to where they are
shortcutting China, instead of having it delivered from China,
getting it straight to Mexico. What is the cooperation like
with Mexico right now for that as well?
Mr. Baldwin. Senator, in regards to DEA's cooperation with
Mexico, it is good.
Within Mexico, we have seen this substance move into Mexico
where it is being produced, but as it was said in the opening
statements, the percentage and the purity of the substance
coming over the border, on the Southern Border, is a lot less
than it is coming through the mail service.
We are also looking to try to bring both Mexico and China
together to collaborate on this issue, to be able to deal with
those substances, as you said, the precursors that are going to
Mexico that are then coming into the United States. That is one
of the things we are working on, but we do have a decent
relationship with our folks in Mexico as well to be able to
deal with this problem.
Obviously, we want to make sure that they are working with
China to make sure that they address the threat that they have
in their country as well.
Senator Lankford. Thank you.
Can I make one quick comment as well, Mr. Chairman, to be
able to say this, not only thank you for allowing me to be able
to go quickly on this to be able to get to the next meeting,
but I also want to be able to highlight the Inspector General
for the Postal Service, not only for the work that they have
done and the reports that they have done. But many people may
not know, Senator Heitkamp and I have worked on this for quite
a while.
The Postal Service Inspector General has worked with all
Inspectors General to be able to pull together a website called
Oversight.gov that is getting all the IG reports out for every
single group, and though they are not named on that, their team
was a major player on getting those reports out. And that is
exceptionally helpful to all of us.
So, just publicly, we come at you with questions a lot, but
let me also say thank you for that. Now, that is not related to
this hearing, but it is valuable to all of us, so thank you.
Senator Portman. Thank you.
Senator Carper. Senator Lankford, you remind me of a point.
I made it earlier. Senator Heitkamp and I had a side-bar
conversation just a moment ago about this.
The Postal Service is not running out of money. They are
out of money. They are heading for essentially what we call
bankruptcy, and we have an obligation in this Committee and
this Congress to enable them to be successful and not only
provide legitimate service that is needed, but to better ensure
that the delivery of fentanyl and these kind of narcotic drugs
is diminished and hopefully eliminated. So it is just a timely
reminder on another front.
What I would like to do, I want to ask each of you, one by
one. I will start with you, Mr. Murphy. One thing that we can
do to help you and your folks do a better job, one thing we can
do?
Mr. Murphy. Senator, at the----
Senator Carper. It might be something we are doing, maybe
something we need to do better. My dad used to say to my sister
and I when we had chores to do, growing up in West Virginia, he
would say, ``A job worth doing is worth doing well,'' and out
of that, I took the idea that everything I do, I can do better.
What can we do to enable you and your folks to do a better job?
Mr. Murphy. Senator, the attention that the issue has
gotten domestically is something that is noticed
internationally, and the higher profile of this issue is useful
bureaucratically, certainly. And so I personally in my work
appreciate the attention that the issue has received, so thank
you.
Senator Carper. Mr. Cintron.
Mr. Cintron. Senator Carper, what we would be looking for
is comprehensive postal reform. If we could get help there,
that would be tremendous.
Senator Carper. All right. Thank you.
Mr. Owen. And, sir, again, with the exponential growth in
e-commerce through the mail facilities, express courier
facilities, additional staffing in these regards would help us,
as well as the continued support of the analytical work that we
are doing at the national targeting center, as well as our
laboratory and scientific services folks.
Senator Carper. All right. Thank you. Mr. Siemer.
Mr. Siemer. Postal Governors. I think we have talked about
how this is a strategic problem and it is something that
requires a sense of urgency. I think having Governors on board
for the Postal Service would bring both of those in addition to
all of the leadership they are already receiving in the Postal
Service.
Senator Carper. A timely point that you raise, there are no
current Governors on the Postal Board of Governors, other than
the Postmaster General and the Deputy Postmaster General.
It is the second largest corporation. Imagine the second
largest corporation in this country operating without a board
of directors. That is essentially where we are, and it is just
unconscionable.
We have three nominees from the administration. We need
another one. I am going to be meeting today with someone
originally nominated by President Obama, who I think would be a
very good candidate. If he is nominated, that will give us two
Democrats and two Republicans, and at least he would have a
quorum to go forward with. That is a wonderful point and a
timely point. Thank you.
All right. Mr. Baldwin.
Mr. Baldwin. Yes, Senator. DEA is always appreciative of
any additional tools and authorities that are granted to us to
address the opioid epidemic.
Senator Carper. Can you be more specific?
Mr. Baldwin. Specifically, well, our priorities are
outlined in our 2018 budget proposal, the administration's
budget proposal. So, as those are prioritized by people that
are much smarter than me at DEA headquarters, that is what I
would ask. We would prioritize those particular budget
proposals.
But in regards to the specific threat, we have a number of
things in regards to scheduling, scheduling actions, schedule
controls, those types of things that we would look at to be
able to better address this threat as we see it.
Senator Carper. All right. Thanks.
Mr. Baldwin. Thank you.
Senator Carper. Mr. Nevano?
Mr. Nevano. Senator, I want to thank you for the resources
that Congress gives us both in budget as well as personnel, but
with more, we can do more. So my answer would be resources. The
more resources, the more special agents we have, the more
staffing we have would allow us to do our job more effectively.
Senator Carper. Thank you.
Several of you mentioned China. I think almost every one of
you have mentioned China. About two or three years ago, the
president of China was coming to the United States. He was
going to meet with President Obama. I think they met in
Washington State, and one of the things that was raised by
President Obama, an issue we had raised with China a number of
times before, and that was our unhappiness--actually anger with
their allowing folks within China to launch these hacks and to
come after our intellectual property rights (IPR) and money and
a number of other things of value.
Every time we raised this with China, they would say nobody
was responsible for it or was actually doing this, it is not
the military, it is not the Chinese military. it is not part of
our government, it is just happening, and different people are
doing this stuff.
We did not believe them, and when President Obama met with
President Xi about two or three years ago in Washington State,
he raised this issue with President Xi. President Xi said,
``No, it is not us. It is rogue elements within our country
that are doing this.'' President Obama said, ``This is who is
doing it. This is where they are located it. These are their
people, and if you do not do something about it, you are going
to find it much more difficult to sell your goods and products
and services in this country.'' President Xi acknowledged that
they could help, and they have. They have not stopped all the
hacks from China, but it has slowed them down a whole lot.
We had a similar experience with Iran. Iran for years and
years was trying to shut down our banks. Get on their websites;
shut them down. And literally, a week after we entered into the
comprehensive agreement with Iran on not developing a nuclear
weapon, guess what stopped? The attacks on our banks.
When we think about root causes, it is not just working on
the insatiable appetite we have for illegal drugs, like these
opioids, but others as well.
Let us focus on China. I said earlier I am going to reach
out to Terry Branstad, now Ambassador to China, next week. I am
hoping some of my colleagues can join us--to ask what they are
doing at our embassy, what are you doing and what do we need to
do to help address the root cause from your end, from where you
are located.
Mr. Baldwin, why is it important that we engage with China?
Please give us an update on cooperative efforts with your
counterparts in China to help identify the sources of fentanyl
and other synthetic opioids.
Mr. Baldwin. Senator, thank you for the question.
Put quite simply, the reason we have to engage with China
is because as anybody who has changed oil in their car, we know
the big side of the funnel and the small side of the funnel.
China is the small side of the funnel, meaning that is the
place where things are originating. We need to get the packages
before they get to the United States and branch out to a
thousand different locations within the United States.
We can try to track every package. We can try to address
every threat, every trafficker within the United States, but if
we can get to the small end of the funnel, attack some of those
distributors within China that are sending tens of thousands of
packages to the United States, we would have a greater impact.
The importance of working with China is just that. We have the
ability to do that with them, along with them, and that is fed
by information from CBP, Postal, our partners at HSI. We
identify packages here. We identify the shipping origin and
take the head off the snakes.
Senator Carper. All right. Thanks for that response, and
when we have a second round, I am going to come back and
revisit this with others of you on the panel. Thanks so much.
Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Portman. Chairman Johnson.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
This is really for Mr. Baldwin or Mr. Nevano. I read an
article. I do not think it has been covered in the hearing. It
said that about $800 worth of precursor ingredients for
fentanyl produces about $800,000 worth of street-value drug. Is
that even close to true?
Mr. Nevano. Senator, I would say that that is an accurate
assessment. We know that the profit margin in fentanyl is much
higher than, let us say, heroin, so your statement is accurate.
Chairman Johnson. So, obviously, where there is a demand,
it is going to be supplied with that kind of profit potential.
I want to talk a little bit about the difference between--
and I am not going to hold you to these figures at all, but can
you give us some sort of sense? What percent of the fentanyl is
coming in through Mexico, having been transshipped, and how
much is coming in through directly through our postal system?
I will talk about the purity differences later, but just
give us a sense.
Mr. Nevano. I am not sure if my colleague at CBP might be
able to answer that better, Senator.
Chairman Johnson. Again, whoever can best answer these
questions, hop right in.
Mr. Owen. Just based on our interdictions, just based on
the seizures, we are seeing more larger seizures, of course,
through the Southwest Border. Again, the purity, 90 percent
pure, very small. The average shipment through the mail is only
700 grams.
When we just look at our data for 2017, 854 pounds of
fentanyl was seized in the land border; 335 pounds were seized
in the express and mail environment. So much higher quantities
but much lower purity.
Chairman Johnson. Why the difference in the purity? Are
they cutting it in Mexico to actually be used immediately, or
is it just the practicality of you want to ship smaller
quantities?
Mr. Owen. The seizures that we see, the fentanyl is mixed
in with other narcotics, other hard narcotics, whereas in the
mail environment, express environment, it is all just a single
shipment of the fentanyl, that pure by itself.
Chairman Johnson. So the stuff coming directly through the
postal system, is that getting sent to other labs to be
processed, cut further, so that you take that 100 percent
purity fentanyl?
Generally, when somebody is abusing fentanyl, what percent
purity is in that tablet?
Mr. Baldwin. Senator, I think you have hit on something
that is crucially important. I think we have two really threat
areas. We have the Southern Border threat, where precursors for
making fentanyl are found in Mexico, and they are producing
fentanyl there. It then is adulterated into other illegal drugs
that are being pushed across the border.
We then have the mail stream, as you said, that has a
higher purity. Those then are being used at times within the
United States in what we call ``pill mill operations,'' where
that fentanyl is pushed into a pill. It is a counterfeit pill.
I mentioned counterfeit pills in my opening remarks. They look
much like those same similar pills that drove the opioid crisis
to begin with. The dosage amount in those pills is 1 milligram.
So 1 milligram of fentanyl, if it is about 98 percent pure--1
milligram is one-thousandths of a gram. There is a thousand
grams in a kilo. That means there is a million milligrams in a
kilo. So that is how many pills could be made. That is in the
pill mill operation process.
Chairman Johnson. In the brief material, it almost sounded
like there are just users directly buying that. Is that also
the case, or is it almost 100 percent of the case where these
things are really being shipped to some kind of pill mill?
Mr. Nevano. Senator, it is like any other e-commerce
commodity right now. End users can actually sit in their living
room and order these illicit opioids online for their----
Chairman Johnson. With 90 percent purity?
Mr. Nevano. Yes.
Chairman Johnson. Will they be getting 90 percent purity?
Mr. Nevano. That is accurate, Senator.
Chairman Johnson. Is that why they are dying so quick?
Mr. Nevano. That would be accurate, Senator.
Chairman Johnson. Picking up on what Senator Carper was
talking about, specifically what would you like to see China
do? I mean specifically. Are they not investigating this? Are
they turning a blind eye? I mean, specifically what would you
like them to do?
Mr. Baldwin. Well, thank you for the question. Working in
China, of course, has its challenges. There are things that
China has done. Back in 2015, as I mentioned, they changed
their law to where they were able to adapt to a threat in a
third country.
In the United States, if we have an abuse of a certain
substance that is not controlled in China, their law is now
adapted to where we can take that abuse data and provide it to
China where they then can change their law.
DEA has a mechanism that is set up within our chemical
evaluation section within DEA headquarters where we are
evaluating different substances, the harm and the effect that
it is having on the American people, and we are providing that
information directly back to China for their action.
So when you ask what I want China to do, I would like them
to continue down that road. They have taken it seriously--they
have controlled a number of different fentanyls. We have
prioritized fentanyl information, provided it to the Chinese,
and they have actually controlled our top four asks. We want
that dialogue to continue. We are hopeful it does. We want it
to get better and better. We want our experts to meet on a
regular basis and exchange this important information.
Again, this is something that we can do to directly address
those threats that are here in the United States with China.
Chairman Johnson. So it was not a glaring omission. It is
just a matter they are doing good things; they just need to do
more of it. Is that----
Mr. Baldwin. Absolutely. I think that is one aspect of what
they can do. It is one piece of the puzzle. Again, there is
multiple problems here. There is multiple facets to this
problem.
Chairman Johnson. One of the problems really is that the
analogs and our inability in our law, probably China's law as
well, is keeping up with the minute change in the chemistry of
these things.
That is why we introduced the Stopping Overdoses of
Fentanyl Analogues (SOFA) Act. I know DEA has also tried to do
that through its regulatory powers, but they are a little
concerned they may be butting up against their own legal
requirements. Can you talk about the need to actually codify
that?
Mr. Baldwin. Senator, thank you for that question.
I am not familiar with all the details within the SOFA Act.
I am aware of it.
If we have another tool that is provided to DEA for us to
deal with this problem and that is the act that gives us that
too, we are happy----
Chairman Johnson. You are constrained right now in terms of
rapidly scheduling one of these analogs, correct?
Mr. Baldwin. We have existing authorities to move forward
and schedule substances. That is not something I am intimately
familiar with. I am within the operations division. We have
people like I said, the planning and evaluation folks, the
people that are in the chemical section, that do this on a
daily basis.
However, if we have tools that are offered to us in
whatever bill, we are happy to work with you to try to assist
you in moving that bill forward.
Chairman Johnson. Just real quick, because I was very
pleased to hear that you have actually trained dogs in
fentanyl, I thought if you did that, they would die. So that is
very good news.
How many more canine units do you need? I would ask you
just in general. I think we are all very supportive of it on
this Committee, but for this particular task, how many canine
units could you use?
Mr. Owen. We can always increase the resources at these
facilities. I think it is important when Congress has supported
us before with canines that it also needs to come with the
handler.
Chairman Johnson. Right.
Mr. Owen. A lot of times, the canine comes by itself.
Chairman Johnson. I was going to say a unit.
Mr. Owen. A unit. Any support we can get on that would be
helpful.
We currently have just under 500 dogs working at our ports
of entry. So any enhancement to that would increase our
detection capabilities.
Chairman Johnson. But again, they are detecting all kinds
of things. Are they primarily drugs, and is it a specific dog
for a specific drug?
Mr. Owen. Our dogs are generally two caliber, two types of
dogs. We have the narcotics detector dogs that will interdict
six types of narcotics, and then we have dogs that detect
currency and firearms for our outbound threat. The dogs are
split between those two.
Chairman Johnson. So you have been able to add fentanyl to
that six?
Mr. Owen. We have added--yes.
Chairman Johnson. OK.
Mr. Owen. Fentanyl is----
Chairman Johnson. That is impressive. Again, thanks for
your service.
Mr. Owen. Thank you.
Senator Portman. Thank you.
Let me just quickly follow-up on China, DEA and Justice
recently indicted two Chinese nationals, as was widely
publicized, and they indicted them because they were using the
mail to ship large amounts of fentanyl to the United States.
The question is, What can China do?
It is fine to schedule these precursors, the things that go
into making fentanyl. It is fine to schedule the analogs. This
is a good idea, but it is about actually taking action and
prosecutions.
So let me ask you, Mr. Baldwin, about those two individuals
who were indicted. The Justice Department and DEA were
involved. Have they been prosecuted?
Mr. Baldwin. Thank you for the question.
The current status, I am not absolutely certain where they
are within the system within China.
I do know this. I do know that the traffickers and the
shippers of these substances from China are very creative. So
if they have the ability--and you probably learned this with
your own inside investigation--that if something is controlled
in China, they usually divert to another substance that is not
controlled and----
Senator Portman. Let me just back up for a second. I
understand the challenges----
Mr. Baldwin. Yes.
Senator Portman [continuing]. And we have talked a lot
about that. There is also a transshipment challenge and so on,
but I asked you a specific question: Have those individuals
been arrested? Have they been prosecuted?
Mr. Baldwin. I am----
Senator Portman. The answer is no, unless you are going to
correct me.
Mr. Baldwin. No, they are currently not in custody.
Senator Portman. OK. Well, that is the answer. The answer
is no.
Mr. Baldwin. Yes.
Senator Portman. So to the Chairman's good question about
what could the Chinese do, how about prosecuting these two
individuals who you all have indicted? I mean, two individuals
out of the thousands of labs in China that are sending this
poison into our communities, that would be a good step.
Senator Carper. If I could just have a moment. To follow
up, the Chinese have to feel like they have a dog in this
fight, and there are some in China who frankly would like to
see us further weakened as a Nation. And our continued use,
abuse, overuse of these harmful narcotics weakens us. There is
enormous amounts of money to be made, and we are talking about
money that is going to flow from this country to their country.
Somehow they have to be made to believe or understand that
they have a dog in this fight. Partially, it is to say the
customers for these drugs may be your people, not just ours.
But also, when the President of the United States meets
with the leader of China, it is important that this be at or
near the top of the issues that are raised.
Senator Portman. Senator Heitkamp.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR HEITKAMP
Senator Heitkamp. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I think this is the third or fourth time we have been in
this room talking about this, and I have to tell you this
investigation reminds us that we are not doing everything and
with a sense of urgency that we need to do. I recognize you are
all working really hard on this, that you all want to see
success, but we have to be more urgent about this.
We can build a $20-billion wall, but if we do not solve
this problem, we will not have solved the problem of
interdicting drugs. If we simply focus on China, we will not
solve the problem of interdicting these drugs. If we simply
focus on Mexico--fentanyl in my State that killed kids, that
led to a huge investigation. One of the first came from China
to Canada to Portland, Oregon, to North Dakota.
Last time we were here, we talked about treaties. We talked
about the need to work government to government with
authorities like Mr. Owen's to try and see are the treaties
stopping us from doing what we need to do. Are we on the right
path?
I want to expand this discussion because it is not just
about drug interdiction, and, Mr. Owen, you have made such a
great point about e-commerce. As e-commerce grows, this problem
will get worse and worse, and it will not just be about illegal
drugs. It is going to be about counterfeit goods. It is going
to be about avoiding goods that may, in fact, injure from a
consumer protection standpoint, whether it is lead paint and
toys. Whatever it is, we need to have our laws enforced that
protect the public safety.
We are failing, and we are failing because we have
understaffed and under-resourced the post office. I think it is
pretty clear. We are failing because we have not worked in a
government-to-government way to really close the loopholes, and
this is not just about drugs. It is about all of e-commerce.
As the States--and I think that the court probably will
give the States the ability to collect sales tax. The States
are going to have some skin in the game because it may drive
some offshoring of e-commerce to avoid sales tax
responsibilities in States, and so those of us who live on the
border understand the complexities of working to make sure that
we are not shutting down commerce, but that we are in fact
protecting public health and safety.
Now, Mr. Baldwin, one of the questions that I have, you
have described the funnel, right? We want to get to that point,
a lot of talk about China. How easy is it if we got 100 percent
complete cooperation from China, we got extradition or we got
prosecutions, whatever it might be, for that to be offshore and
move someplace else? Given the high profit margin that Mr.
Nevano described and Chairman Johnson described, how difficult
is it? My point in asking that is if we simply say we are going
to focus all of our attention on that one point of development
before it expands up to the points of entry into this country,
how difficult is it to move that around the world? Mr. Baldwin.
Mr. Baldwin. Senator, thank you for your question, and the
answer to that is it is very easy to do. There are multiple
countries, I think, that stand and they are ready to try to
take up where China would leave off.
Senator Heitkamp. Why not? I mean, if we are looking at
that kind of profit margin.
I think it is really important that we not spend all of our
time here simply focused on China. We have to understand that
because of what Chairman Johnson and at the time Chairman
Carper continue to talk about the insatiable appetite for these
kinds of drugs, we have to understand that while we are trying
to deal with demand, we cannot let supply come in in the amount
that it is because it has driven the street price down, and it
has created an opportunity for transition from prescription
drugs to illegal street drugs.
I am glad you brought it up. We have seized these fake oxys
that are fentanyl, and the people who are doing it do not have
PhDs in chemistry, and they are putting amounts in there that
is lethal, never mind the destruction that it does to the
social safety net of this country. It is killing people.
My request would be what are the strategies not just
dealing with China, but what are the strategies to deal with
these precursor problems, to deal with all of this, and how,
Mr. Owen, do we need to do a better job to give you the tools
to interdict at the points of entry?
I just want to make one point about how pervasive this can
be. When I was Attorney General, I ran the drug task forces. We
knew we had a huge meth problem, a lot of attention paid to
labs--90 to 95 percent of all the meth that was consumed in
North Dakota came in through Mexico. It was not homegrown.
We got a tip that there was a package with meth. We lined
it up, brought in the dogs. We had probably 10 packages. They
hit on three. That is what we know. We know that we are just
getting inundated, and so what can we do, working within our
international cooperation, renegotiate the postal agreements
that we have to avoid--that limit you from doing what you need
to do, Mr. Owen, in terms of interdiction?
Mr. Owen. Well, again, having the advanced data so we can
target not only from China, but as you mentioned, as the
threats shift, as they try to transship.
And you are absolutely right. In the e-commerce, CBP is
looking at this space as an all-threats environment. We do have
the narcotics interdictions, but we have trade compliance
issue. We have public health and safety.
The e-commerce growth, 1.4 million parcels a day cross our
borders right now, and it is only going to continue to
increase.
Senator Heitkamp. The reason why I ask this is because the
last time we were here, we heard over and over again from the
Postal Service that their treaties or their relationships,
international contracts--I think they are probably treaties.
The treaties that they have with Canada, with other
international groups, limit their ability to do interdiction.
Is that still true?
[No response.]
Because we have been at this a long time, we were told we
cannot use dogs by DEA last time because the fentanyl kills
them. Now we are hearing you are using dogs.
We were told last time that the postal agreements
internationally limit our ability to do work. Now no one can
answer that question. We have to get an urgency to this, and we
have to deal with it not just about illegal drugs, but
everything else that we expect to protect our borders.
And so I want to thank you all. This is not the end of
this. I want to thank the Chairman for the excellent work that
was done here. I think that we did not reveal anything in this
report that we did not know, and I want to point out that the
two Chinese individuals who were indicted were indicted in
North Dakota.
Senator Portman. We will hear later, more from Mr. Murphy,
about the issue of the international treaties, as you rightly
called them, and what the Universal Postal Union challenges
are.
But you are right. I do not think we have had the urgency,
and we have spent 10 years going back and forth on this, and
what we have to show for it is a bar code. That is fine. It is
a sticker, but there is no information on the bar code for most
countries, for most packages. We do have to accelerate this.
As was said, this is an urgent problem, and we need to be
more aggressive.
Senator Heitkamp. Mr. Chairman, the point that I want to
make about e-commerce is that this is not just limited, and if
we just simply focus on drug interdiction and on China, which
is our immediate problem, we will miss the opportunity to fix
the broader problem or at least provide a broader sweep in
terms of what we need on all of e-commerce, whether it is
counterfeit goods, whether it is things that violate public
health and safety, whether it is, in fact, things that are
happening to do tax evasion.
Senator Portman. Senator Klobuchar.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR KLOBUCHAR
Senator Klobuchar. Thank you very much, and thank you, Mr.
Chairman and Senator Carper, for inviting me to join today. I
think this report is incredibly important and shed some light
on just what is going on here.
I personally think, well, maybe some of this information
has been out here. It is pretty stunning.
And I also want to thank the Chairman. He and I are leading
the bill to do something about this, the STOP Act, which would
require shipments from foreign countries through our postal
system to provide advanced electronic data before these
shipments enter the United States.
I got interested in this because, like so many other
Senators, I saw what was happening in Minnesota--637 deaths
from opioids and other drug overdoses in 2016. That is more
than the number of car crashes and homicides combined in my
State. Almost 100 of these deaths, 96 of them involve
synthetics, a nearly 80 percent increase from the previous
year, and 85 involved fentanyl.
And one of them was Prince. But it is not just celebrities
that die from fentanyl. It is a lot of little kids in our State
as well--high school kids, college kids, and we have to do
something about this.
So I guess I will start with you, Mr. Owen. As you know,
this bill would show us where the package is coming from, who
it is going to, where it is going, and what is in it. How would
this sort of information help Customs and Border Protection
detect and interdict shipments of illicit drugs like fentanyl?
Mr. Owen. Yes, absolutely. When we look at the way the
process works, it is that it is critical that we receive the
advanced data on all cargo shipments, including what we are
seeing in the mail, prior to the arrival of those shipments, so
that we can use our analytical tools, our past seizure records,
the connections that we make through our national targeting
center, to make those connections, and then advise the Postal
Service so that they can present the parcel before.
I could give a real-life example from just last week at JFK
as to the way this works. We had a shipment coming in from
China. It was an ePacket, one of their express packets. The
advanced information was provided through the Postal Service to
us prior to arrival. We were able to target that shipment prior
to arrival and placed it on hold. The Postal Service presented
it. When we inspected it, we had 28 grams of an unknown white
powder. Using the technology equipment that we now have
deployed at the ports of entry, we were able to identify it as
fentanyl. From there, we were able to work with our criminal
investigative partners at ICE and DEA as well as the New York
Police Department (NYPD), made a controlled delivery on that,
and what we did was we were able to take down three additional
individuals, make an arrest at that facility. The pill presses,
all of the equipment to further manufacture and distribute was
there, as well as two M4's, so two high-powered weapons that
were part of that.
That is just one example, again, only 28 grams of fentanyl,
but it all started with the advanced information provided prior
to arrival of the cargo, allowed us to target based on some
rules that we have in our systems, some connections to previous
seizures, and allow us to deliver consequences with the
criminal investigators to take people into custody. I think
that is a great example just from last week initiated at JFK as
to how this process should work.
Senator Klobuchar. Exactly. So tell me the challenges,
though, and why it is not working everywhere.
Mr. Owen. Well, the challenges, again, is the advanced
information is what we need, and we need to have that advanced
information prior to arrival. It needs to be accurate, and it
needs to be timely. That is an area as you have heard this
morning we are working on very closely. We have made strong
progress, but there is still a lot of work to go in this
regard.
Senator Klobuchar. Can you tell us about the trends that
you have seen, the trends in terms of the amount of synthetic
opioids, including fentanyl, that bad actors from overseas are
shipping in?
Mr. Owen. Absolutely. This problem, as you know, came
really to light a few years back. We continue to see increased
interdictions both in the mail and the express environment.
Last year, of the 335 pounds that we did seize, 92 pounds
were in the mail enforcement and 240 pounds were in the express
environment. So it is a threat through both pathways, also
through the Mexican border, again, less purity on the Mexican
border, mixed in with other seizures of other hard narcotics.
But the trends continue to go up. As all of the changes
that we are putting in place are making us more effective, we
will seize more in 2018 than we did in 2017, but really with
that volume that we are seeing at the borders, interdiction can
only be one small part of the solution because the volume is
just too overwhelming to think we will stop this problem simply
at the border.
Senator Klobuchar. And you and Mr. Cintron talked about the
fact that 23 countries are now sharing this advanced electronic
data with the United States. You said that we are now working
to increase the number. How do you do that? What are your hopes
of doing that?
Mr. Cintron. Yes. One of the ways we do it is through
collaboration. That has kind of been our focus.
Right now, when you think of where we have been with AED,
as we spoke before, from zero to 40 percent, we moved from 8 to
23 countries. We have signed 56 data sharing agreements. So our
focus has really been in focus on the top countries. You have
heard us talk about that, as it represents 90 percent of the
volume coming in.
We have a big push this year in terms of AED. China is an
example. Untracked volumes will yield a significant amount this
year of that AED volume. Our target by the end of the year is
to hit about 70 percent AED just by focusing on that data
partner right now.
So we are already seeing data coming over, but the focus
really is the collaboration, collaboration also by the law
enforcement agencies that help out and for us to focus on those
countries.
Senator Klobuchar. I just think when we see these numbers
coming in--and I am from the State that is known for doing a
lot of treatment, and we think it is really important. That is
part of the reason Senator Portman and I and two other Senators
led the CARA Act, which helped to set a blueprint for our
country. It is why I believe we need to get more funding in the
budget upcoming for opioids, and it is also one of the reasons
that I think we need to do a better job of policing what the
drug companies have been doing in terms of getting people
hooked on this.
But this issue is something that is just getting worse and
worse with fentanyl. It is up to 100 times more potent, as you
know, than morphine. We are seeing an increase in carfentanil,
100 times more powerful. A dose the size of two grains of salt
can be fatal. So I would just ask you to--especially the Postal
Service as we go forward, we are trying to gather support for
our bill because if we can stop some of this--I know it is not
the only solution. You have to look at many prongs, as Senator
Heitkamp pointed out, but this has to be part of this.
And the one other thing I would add is something that
Senator Graham and I are leading. It is in my bill, the SALT
Act, to make it easier to prosecute the sale and distribution
of synthetics because, as you know, these analogs, all our law
enforcement people know what goes on. They basically take a
chemical makeup, change it a bit, and then it is not on our
list.
And so Senator Graham and I have a bill, which we have a
number of supporters on, going through Judiciary to make it
easier to go after those analogs and be as sophisticated as the
people that are trying to get people hooked on drugs that
ultimately kill them.
So I just want to thank the Chairman for his great
leadership on this, for this report, and I hope it moves all of
us to more action.
Thank you.
Senator Portman. Thank you, Senator Klobuchar, and thanks
for your leadership on the STOP Act and more broadly on what we
talked about earlier, which is the need for more prevention,
certainly more treatment, and then longer-term recovery. That
is all part of it, but if we can keep this poison from coming
into our country in the first place, we need to do it. And we
know we can, and what this report showed clearly is that we are
not doing what we even can do within our current budget
constraints.
I appreciate the fact that in response to Senator Carper's
question, the answer almost universally was more funding. We
will talk a little about this in a moment when I ask a question
of you all.
I want to let Senator Daines go, but I do not disagree with
that. More funding is important, and we did just pass
legislation to provide more funding to CBP to be able to have
monitoring equipment to detect fentanyl.
But we have other problems here, gentlemen. We are not
coordinating well. We are not doing what we should be doing.
Last year, we were able to get advanced electronic data on
36 percent of mail. That was the number from last year. It was
the same as the previous year, and even during the year, you
have a chart in your report you can see. It was flat.
We are not doing what Commissioner Owen has just told us he
needs, which is finding these packages, to be able to pull them
offline, test them, get rid of this poison so it does not come
into our communities, and then go after the individuals who are
sending them. Senator Daines.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR DAINES
Senator Daines. Mr. Chairman, thank you, and thank you for
your leadership, for you and what your staff has done to
produce this report.
We are seeing this in Montana. Looking at the map up here,
if you look at Montana, there is not a lot of color on it, but
I will tell you, it is costing our State dearly.
In fact, in 2015, 35 Montanans died. This opioid epidemic
nationally continues to drain fiscal resources that could
otherwise be spent on other services.
In fact, I was struck by the Council of Economic Advisors
issued a report last November, estimated economic losses are
over half a trillion dollars in 2015 alone.
So to what the chairman just mentioned, we need to better
our efforts on intercepting these shipments so that the United
States Postal Service and the CBP can prevent the distribution
of opioids in the first place.
Mr. Baldwin, in my days with Procter & Gamble (P&G), I
spent over 5\1/2\ years actually working in China. I was one of
the early pioneers who was sent over by P&G to develop and grow
our business, to make great American brands and produce and
ship those to the Chinese consumer.
I understand a substantial amount of USPS shipments
containing opioids originates from China. So it is not
surprising you are here as a leading expert on China at the
DEA.
Could you share with the Committee China's relationship
with the DEA?
Mr. Baldwin. Certainly, Senator. Thank you for your
question.
DEA has had a presence in China beginning in Hong Kong back
in the 1970s. We sent liaison officers up to Beijing on a
regular basis to engage with the Chinese. That relationship, as
you know, having spent time in China--a long-term relationship
in China is much better than a short-term relationship in the
sense that you build rapport and understanding. You have the
ability to ask more. You have the ability to get more done.
DEA's presence in China is important, obviously, in regards
to this threat. We have a direct liaison with the Narcotics
Control Bureau, which is under the Ministry of Public Security,
which is in China. They are a single-mission entity, much like
DEA. So when we come into a room, there are a lot of political
issues out there potentially that could cause some problems for
us.
We see eye to eye in the sense that, hey, we both have a
common mission. At least we can start there, right?
Now we have a country attache stationed, of course, full-
time in Beijing. We have a number of different employees, and
we are expanding our presence. If you spent time when you were
in China down in Guangzhou, we are opening another office down
in Guangzhou in order to expand into the province where we then
would be able to have direct engagement with the provincial law
enforcement authorities, who then are the ones who are actually
doing the work. Our goal is to build on that rapport. We know
our partners from HSI have presence there as well.
We are looking to expand our connectivity with China. We
are hopeful that that office in Guangzhou will be valuable for
us getting additional information regarding the----
Senator Daines. We actually lived in Guangzhou.
Mr. Baldwin. Oh, you did?
Senator Daines. Had two children born in Hong Kong, in
fact. You talked about playing for the long view, it is
interesting to go back in the history, the mid-1800s, the opium
wars.
Mr. Baldwin. Yes.
Senator Daines. This is a problem that goes back a long
ways and something that is not new.
I have to commend the Chairman. I led a CODEL to China
about a year ago, and Chairman Portman came with us to China.
He was such a strong advocate in directly questioning the
premier, the chairman there, about how do we reduce the source
of fentanyl, carfentanil, occurring right there in China, being
shipped directly in the United States. I am grateful for your
leadership there, Senator Portman.
If you look at that map, just the devastation this is
creating in Ohio and other places around this country, so I
appreciate your work around the world as we are trying to get
to the root cause in stopping the scourge on our Nation.
Mr. Cintron, just last week in my home State, Montana, the
Flathead Beacon reported that there was a couple employed there
by the USPS in Polson, Montana, that was caught distributing
methamphetamine through postal shipments, again, employees of
the USPS.
Now, a city like Polson, Montana, it is beautiful. It sits
right in the south tip of Flathead Lake. It is in close
proximity to Glacier National Park. Their population is less
than 5,000 people. It is concerning that a half a pound of meth
could be shipped directly into this small community.
I will tell you I am grateful for our law enforcement
officials. Their vigilance uncovered this operation, and we
need to do more to stop the spread of this meth epidemic that
is occurring in Montana.
The question is, What detection and preventive measures is
the USPS taking to combat the domestic shipment of meth in
rural America?
Mr. Cintron. I am going to ask the Inspector to step up and
answer that question.
Mr. Cottrell. Yes, Senator. Thank you. Guy Cottrell. I was
sworn in at the beginning of the hearing. I am our Chief Postal
Inspector.
As we have heard before, the challenges for domestic are
just as challenging as it is for international, except the mail
volume is even higher in the domestic arena. So we use our
intelligence. We use our past seizure data. We use our
intelligence from working with our law enforcement partners,
both Federal, State, and local, as well as Postal Service
business data and package history.
And, of course, for employee cases, we work with our Office
of Inspector General to partner closely, and Mr. Siemer spoke
about some of their efforts as well.
Senator Daines. So while we still have you there----
Mr. Cottrell. Sure.
Senator Daines [continuing]. I still do not understand how
a couple that is employed by the USPS in Polson could be caught
in part because it is a real small community. It is more
difficult to hide. It is a close-knit community, and clearly we
need to step up enforcement.
What can we do in Congress? This might be a two-part
question too as well. What can we do here that helps you in
those efforts?
Mr. Cottrell. From my vantage point, the Postal Service has
given the Inspection Service additional resources to combat
narcotics in the mail. We have assembled a team of experts to
both work on the international angle as well as the domestic
angle, so I will speak from the Inspection Service side.
Certainly, Mr. Siemer can cover the IG side.
But from our vantage point, again, as we have said before,
comprehensive postal reform to allow us to continue doing what
we do with the Postal Service and postal operations.
But you are absolutely right. In the small communities,
sometimes it is just criminal intelligence. Sometimes we get a
tip from someone that will tell us about something, something
like that, but comprehensive reform from my end.
Mr. Siemer. I will just speak for the Inspector General's
office. We receive our funding through the Postal Service, but
we are treated through the appropriations process. So the
Postal Service just cannot give us additional resources. It is
up to Congress and the appropriations committees to give us
additional funding and resources for these kinds of
initiatives.
Because we are appropriated, we are facing the same kind of
reduction in government that all the administrations are
facing. We are already facing a smaller budget environment,
anyway, as this crisis is emerging. So additional resources for
us would be very appreciated.
Senator Daines. All right.
Mr. Chairman, I am out of time. Thank you.
Senator Portman. Thank you, Senator Daines. Thanks for your
leadership on this issue, and Senator Daines did mention our
travels to China last year and the opportunity to speak with
Chinese leadership about this issue. And he is correct. We
raised it. We raised it in strong terms.
One of the points that I made, as Senator Daines will
recall, to Senator Carper's point earlier, is the fact that in
China--and, Mr. Baldwin, I think you would confirm this--they
have a growing problem of opioid addiction. That is not
surprising, given the fact that they are producing more and
more of these opioids to send to this lucrative market here in
the United States. There is leakage, and they do have an
interest in this, I would hope, for a lot of reasons, including
the number of overdose deaths here in this country and lives
being taken off track but also because of their own internal
issues.
With regard to the testimony earlier, Mr. Owen, you said
that it is really important to have this advanced electronic
data, and as I said earlier, the fact that most of you have
responded to the question and we just need more money, I would
just make an obvious point. I do not disagree. More resources
are important. That is why we just passed legislation to give
you more resources on the monitoring equipment. But it is a lot
more cost effective for you and your people to have advanced
electronic data, isn't it?
Mr. Owen. Yes, it is. The manual process that is the
alternative will just not meet the challenges that we face,
having to take bags of mail and run it through the x-rays, run
it through the dogs, or use the intuition of the officer. The
volume is just too overwhelming. We have to employ a risk
management approach that relies heavily on the data, the
analytics that we do, the targeting work that we do. The data
is the key.
Senator Portman. Let me just take this to the next level
because there was a lot of information in this report that was
not previously known. Some of this new information was that you
had to say we need to target certain countries because of this
manual inspection, and my understanding from our report and our
investigation is that you actually were not able to include
China among those target countries. Why? Because there were too
many packages from China. That is not responding to the threat,
which we know is from China, but it is responding to the
reality that we do not have this advanced electronic data to be
able to target packages.
You could not even look at any packages from China. Now you
have some advanced electronic data from China. The 36 percent
figure we talked about earlier, which leads to over 300 million
packages unmonitored includes packages from China. We think
about 50 percent of the packages from China are now including
this advanced electronic data because of the ePacket agreement
you have with China, and that is good. But we are still letting
so much of this through.
The other point that you make in your testimony is that
even if you have advanced electronic data and you know this
package is suspicious, 20 percent of the time, the post office
cannot find the package to present to you to be able to check
it. Is that accurate?
Mr. Owen. Yes. When we started the program, the
presentation rate was much less. The Postal Service has now put
some new mechanisms in place, some software technologies and
things of that nature. The increase and the presentation rate
has gone up significantly, but 80 percent is not where we
ultimately need to be.
Senator Portman. So 20 percent of these packages that are
identified as suspicious are still getting through. I know you
need more resources, that is fine, but this is a management
challenge. To let these packages go requires better
coordination with all of you, particularly with CBP and the
Postal Service, and it requires, as you said earlier, accurate,
timely information and then the presentation of those packages.
Let me go back to the origins of our problem, which is the
lack of information coming from these countries.
Mr. Murphy, you talked earlier about where you are in terms
of working with the other countries around the world. You
talked about the rapid progress that has been made recently. As
I have said, we have some email traffic indicating otherwise,
but let me, if I could, go to another piece of information we
were able to uncover in our investigation.
If you look at Exhibit A in front of you,\1\ Exhibit A is
an email from May 2017. This is a memo to Deputy Assistant
Secretary of State Nerissa Cook from Gregory Thome, and if you
turn to page 821 of this memo, you will see an unredacted
section on the issue before us, the UPU issue, Universal Postal
Union issue.
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\1\ The Exhibit A document appears in the Appendix on page 205.
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In that section, it states that advanced electronic data is
a topic ``of high interest on Capitol Hill''--``ostensibly
because of the presumed contribution AED would make to
preventing synthetic opioids from arriving in the United States
through international mail.''
The memo then goes on to state, ``Despite its uncertain
benefits for this purpose''--its uncertain benefits for this
purpose, that is opioids--``accelerating the exchange of AED is
one of our highest priorities at the UPU this congressional
cycle because of its clear benefits for aviation security,
Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) enforcement, and expeditious
mail handling.''
I guess the first question is, Were you part of this memo?
Did you help to draft or contribute to this internal memo to
Deputy Assistant Secretary Cook?
Mr. Murphy. Yes, Senator. I drafted the language in
question.
Senator Portman. OK. So is this what we believe? Again,
resources are important, but if we have a government that
thinks that this advanced electronic data could target
counterfeit goods, a fake purse is more important than stopping
a poison coming into our communities, I think we have a problem
of priorities.
I guess I would ask you. Is using advanced electronic data
to target counterfeit goods and intellectual property rights
violations a function of the State Department?
Mr. Murphy. Senator, the State Department does not use this
data for any purpose.
Senator Portman. OK. So, no, that is not your job.
What agency is responsible for using AED to target IPR
violations?
Mr. Murphy. It would be CBP.
Senator Portman. So how did you determine that there was a
clear benefit for using AED to target intellectual property but
not opioids?
Mr. Murphy. Senator, first of all, let me clarify. As you
pointed out, this is an internal memo from one office in a
bureau of the State Department to the leadership of that
bureau, so it does not reflect the views of the Department, per
se. It is part of an internal discussion.
But the use of advanced electronic data for aviation
security, which I think you would agree is a concern on par
with our other high-priority concerns, as well as for IPR
enforcement and for expeditious mail handling, these are the
uses for this data that are very well established that are
familiar to people in the UPU environment that have been talked
about for many years.
The use of this data for specifically targeting synthetic
opioids is no older than the crisis itself, and so it was less
familiar and----
Senator Portman. Let me just interrupt----
Mr. Murphy [continuing]. It reflects perhaps the novelty of
it as much as anything else.
Senator Portman. Let me just interrupt you for a second.
This memo was written last year, May 2017. Are you saying the
State Department did not know that we had an issue with opioids
in May 2017?
Look, I am not trying to put you on the spot personally,
but I think it reflects an attitude, and I think it reflects a
lack of, as was said earlier by Mr. Nevano, the need for us to
be aggressive. Instead, it is an attitude of trying to work
with these countries for 10 years. We have been doing it, with
very little success. We do have the bar code now, which is
great. We just need the information on the bar code, right?
I hope it does not reflect a State Department attitude. I
hope that after you heard from these individuals today and
perhaps from some of the stories here that you have a different
view of this now, that you understand that advanced electronic
data is really important.
Again, it is not the silver bullet. There is no one silver
bullet. We have to stop the demand in this country. We have to
deal with the fact that our addiction rate is so high that we
need more treatment and recovery.
We have a lot of other things to do, but if we have an
attitude in the government that this does not matter, we are
going to continue to have this poison coming in through our
mail system. And Commissioner Owen cannot do his job. He cannot
find the stuff.
I hope that one of the outcomes of this report that Senator
Carper and I worked on and of the hearing today is to
prioritize this issue, and instead of saying it is not as
important as intellectual property, fake purses from China, to
say it is more important--it is about people dying--and
prioritize it.
I thank you again for your service, and I just hope that
you will go back to the UPU and to your partners around the
world and talk about this as an urgent matter.
Let me ask a couple of other questions, if I could. One of
the issues that I think has not been properly explained today
is the fact that there are a lot more overseas packages coming
into America, and it might be helpful, Mr. Cintron, if you
would just give us those numbers. We have them in the report.
They may not be accurate, so I want to hear from you. When I
talked about the fact that there are about 500 million packages
coming into the United States today, that has doubled just in
the last few years.
Now that makes your job harder, but again, all the more
important that we have this data to know what is coming in. Can
you talk a little about that?
Mr. Cintron. Yes. Certainly, I can.
We can probably provide you the specifics on the numbers,
and certainly you are pretty close to that range. We have seen
over a significant amount certainly increase over the last few
years.
A couple things that we are doing: In the last year, we
have deployed a significant amount of processing equipment
around the country, just based on these inbound cities. In the
ISC cities--like up in the Pacific area of California, New
York, Chicago--we have deployed equipment to be able to handle
the influx of volume itself coming in, and so that is one
piece.
The other part is in working to get more AED, as I have
said, we have increased those numbers. We are going to see a
significant amount of AED we believe this year with our efforts
around the untracked volume coming out of China, which we
believe will put us at about 70 percent AED capture by the end
of the year, a significant improvement for this year.
What we have done subsequently on the equipment, not only
do we have the five ISCs running, but what we have done is we
have expanded that to 13 facilities attached to those ISCs,
where we now have the ability to trap and capture.
To the question of the 20 percent that is missing, our
efforts right now are that expansion of equipment, capture
before we get it downstream, and then further to that in the
next several months, we are going to have the capability to
deliver unit level to trap that piece. We certainly always have
the Inspection Service, which at any time while they are
embedded with these other agencies, themselves can intercept
the package anywhere in the domestic mail stream.
There is a lot of effort to get more AED this year, and the
second part, really go after making sure that the 100 pieces we
are asking for is the 100 pieces they are going to get, and we
are laser focused to make sure that every piece that we can
capture, before it gets out of the network itself, that we
capture.
Senator Portman. Well, if I look at what happened in 2017,
it was flat. You talk about 40 percent, I talk about 36
percent, because in December, it was 40 percent. But in
November, it was less than 36 percent. W went up, down, and
back up a little bit at the end. That is not a good trend, and
70 percent would be ambitious, and we are all for that. We want
100 percent, but we are going to have to change some of our
methods and some of our management and some of our priorities
in order to get there.
We talked about the JFK program earlier. This is a program
where, particularly with regard to China, you had an agreement
on these ePackets. I think it is 4.4 pounds or less, packages.
Here is a quote from one of the Customs and Border Protection
officers on the ground working at JFK in an email, ``There has
been no meaningful improvement as the China ePacket pilot
approaches its second year.'' Now, that is one individual.
Commissioner Owen, you may agree or disagree with that. I
would like to hear from you on it, but I just do not think the
evidence supports what you are saying in terms of this priority
and of the significant ramping up, certainly not in the last
year and certainly not with this kind of data. Do you have any
thoughts on that, Commissioner Owen? Do you agree with that CBP
officer?
Mr. Owen. Well, I would just say that I think we learned an
awful lot from the JFK pilot as it was begun. It started with a
very small amount of advanced electronic data coming both from
China and from France.
We had to train our officers on how to effectively target.
We had to work with the Postal Service to make sure that the
packages that we asked to be presented to were in fact
presented. I think we learned a lot from that pilot.
I think it was a slow road, which led to a delay in the
expansion to the other international mail facilities, but I
think we are on the right track now. I think there is a sense
of the urgency behind this, and we will continue to move
forward.
Senator Portman. Mr. Cintron, are you planning to expand
the targeting beyond the Chinese ePackets?
Mr. Owen. Yes. Actually, that will be us, and we do plan to
go beyond the packets.
At JFK right now, we are targeting off eight different
countries. When you look at the volume in the particular mail
facilities as to what is coming from what part of the world, we
basically perform a risk assessment and ask to see the
packages, target specifically for one country that may be of
greater concern than another at that specific international
mail facility.
Senator Portman. Let me just ask a general question and
then turn it over to Senator Carper.
There has been a lot of discussion today about the need to
focus on China, and of course, I agree with that. All the
evidence is, from DEA and elsewhere, that that is the source of
most of this synthetic opioid coming into our country, and most
of it comes through the mail.
But we also know that, as Mr. Baldwin said earlier, this is
a very lucrative trade, and there will be transshipments
through other countries and other means to try to avoid
whatever we come up with.
Mr. Nevano, is it true that if we just focus on one
country--and this kind of goes again to the State Department's
approach to dealing with these countries around the world--that
we are likely to see transshipments to other countries?
Therefore, having a universal application of this, in other
words, telling all countries, ``You want to do business with
us, you have to provide this data,'' is going to be required?
Mr. Nevano. Senator, thank you for your question, and I
would agree with that.
As we as law enforcement improve on our techniques and our
abilities to seize and interdict packages, the nefarious actors
who are involved in this process are only going to change their
modus operandi. They are going to change the way they do
business, as evidenced by packages being transshipped from
China, let us say, to Hong Kong or other intermediary countries
to try to avoid and evade law enforcement efforts.
Senator Portman. Thank you.
I will turn to Senator Carper, and then I have a couple
more questions. Senator Carper.
Senator Carper. Thank you.
I do not know if anybody has ever heard of the name Willie
Sutton before. Every now and then, we talk about Willie Sutton.
He is a famous bank robber, long since died. But many decades
ago, he was finally arrested and put in jail. They asked him at
his trial. They said, ``Mr. Sutton, why do you rob banks?'' and
he responded famously, ``That is where the money is.''
Why do we focus on China? Well, that is because that is
where a lot of this stuff is coming from. Why do we focus on
the Postal Service? That is how a lot of it is getting into
this country.
I am reminded of a game that is played at the boardwalk in
Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. We have a great place called Funland
for our kids. It is a little amusement park and famous for
years, and one of the favorite games is Whack-a-Mole. This is
not a game. That is. This is not a game. But it is also a
different version of Whack-a-Mole because as soon as we
convince the Chinese to help us shut it down there, it will go
someplace else. There is a lot of money to be made.
One of the points that I have made--and I think we keep
making--is this is a multilayered problem. We need a
multilayered approach. I think we are doing that. This is an
all-hands-on-deck moment, and I think we are starting to sense
that urgency.
There is plenty for us to do, and one of the things we
talked about here is the U.S. Postal Service could use some
Governors. They have none. The Postal Service could use some
certain predictability and the ability to generate the revenues
they need, and we need to do a better job on that. So there is
work for all of us to do here.
I want to ask a couple of questions, maybe of Mr. Owen and
Mr. Cintron, if I could. First, for Mr. Owen, the staffing
level, let me just ask at the international service centers.
Would you talk to us about the staffing levels? How have they
changed over the last five years at each of the international
service centers?
Mr. Owen. Well, in the last year, we have increased the CBP
officers by 20 percent in direct response to this threat. Prior
to that, I would say the staffing levels were pretty much
stagnant for the past four or five years, but again, in the
last year, we have added 20 percent additional staff.
Senator Carper. There was much made of our need to tighten
our borders for a variety of reasons--human trafficking, drugs,
and other illicit activities.
We focused a lot on border patrol agents. I think we have
20,000 or more positions that are allocated. I am not sure that
we are actually able to hire that many people. We have a number
of vacancies, as I recall. Hundreds of positions are still
vacant. Correct me if I am wrong.
But I have heard for a number of years that Customs and
Border Protection could use some additional people at the
border crossing. We focus on the borders between border
crossings, but we also need to focus on the proper staffing at
the border crossings themselves, where all of this traffic, all
of this commercial activity is coming through, and a lot of it
is illegal, illicit.
Would you just comment on that, Mr. Owen, please?
Mr. Owen. Yes. Absolutely, sir.
We have within CBP and the Office of Field Operations what
is known as a workload staffing model, and what that model does
is it measures the amount of work and the time it takes an
officer to perform every task that we are required to do, so
how long does it take to do a seven-point vehicle inspection,
how long does it take to board a vessel and do immigration
clearances, how long does it take to process a passenger at the
airports. Then we look at how often we do those activities
across the country throughout the year.
The workload staffing model that has been submitted to
Congress shows that we are understaffed in the officer ranks by
2,518, so that is 2,518----
Senator Carper. Say that one more time.
Mr. Owen. Yes. 2,518 additional officers is what our
workload staffing model that is provided to Congress shows is
what we need to perform the duties at the ports of entry. Also,
631 additional agriculture specialists are needed to address
the needs at the ports of entry.
Senator Carper. All right. Mr. Chairman, we need to take
that to heart, right from the horse's mouth.
Mr. Cintron, I spoke in my opening statement about postal
reform and the need to get the Postal Service the resources
they need to make the kind of investments they need to be
successful as a business and provide the service that we need.
Can you tell us what you think the Postal Service needs
both over the coming weeks and months and in the coming years
to be able to properly handle international package volume and
to facilitate CBP's screening efforts?
Mr. Cintron. Yes. I think the obvious, comprehensive postal
reform goes a long way helping us financially, right? We are
not necessarily waiting as it relates to the international
volumes, as I talked about a minute ago. We are expanding the
network itself to be able to handle any type of volume coming
into the country.
So from our perspective, we are doing those things. We are
not waiting. Certainly, the comprehensive postal reform goes a
long way in keeping us on that financial footing and allowing
us to invest in it.
As you said, very important to think about the data, the
technology, what everybody on this panel is talking about, and
where really investment should be made to make sure that we can
zero in on what we are looking for.
Senator Carper. All right. Thanks.
Mr. Cintron. But reform will help us get there.
Senator Carper. Thanks.
Ms. Siemer, any comments you have on this front, please?
Mr. Siemer. I think the only comment I would make is that
as they collect this advanced electronic data, we need to keep
in mind the quality of the data.
The data itself is only useful for analytics if it is
structured for analytics, and when we started looking at it
last summer, it really looks to us like someone is manually
inputting this overseas. Someone is actually typing in the
addresses.
And to give you an example, just with our building's
address, 1735 North Lynn Street, there are probably 20
different ways a human can type that. They can abbreviate
``Street.'' They can abbreviate ``North.'' They can put periods
in there. They can add extra spaces. When you have humans
entering the data and then that gets fed into the Postal
Service and then that gets fed into targeting, it is almost
impossible to start matching addresses and packages going to
those addresses. It really takes a tremendous amount of cleanup
effort to make it suitable for those kind of efforts.
I think if there is any way that we could require the
countries to structure that data a little bit better or collect
it automatically in some respect would help tremendously, but
in the meantime, some effort needs to be made to clean that up
by somebody.
We are doing it for our analytics, but I think there are
probably other approaches to doing that so that we can all
share the same dataset to do our analytics.
Senator Carper. All right. Thank you.
I have another one for Mr. Cintron and Mr. Owen. The
international mail facility at JFK receives, as we have heard,
the bulk of our country's inbound mail from other places. The
Postal Service and CBP had this pilot program, JFK using
advanced electronic data to target suspicious packages at JFK.
It is designed to help us to manage the high package volumes
while still hopefully preventing illegal items from entering
our country.
I have a question for Mr. Cintron, if I could. I trust the
Postal Service appreciates its role in helping CBP to combat
the flow of dangerous drugs in our communities. I believe you
do. How does the Postal Service plan to address our findings
and recommendations specific to your agency? I will say that
again: How does the Postal Service plan to address our findings
and recommendations, which were released, specific to your
agency?
Mr. Cintron. Well, we are certainly going to take all of
the findings that are in the report and go back and address
them.
Certainly, key for us, as I brought up earlier, two things.
One, working collaboratively to keep getting the percentages.
While we had a bump for a couple of months, there were some
technical issues. When we looked at the growth of AED, it is
significant growth. We expect with our collaboration, it is
going to be significantly higher this year.
The other part is the holds, one key thing that we found in
terms of finding that 20 percent, which is significantly
important to us as well.
So all the findings that we will get there, going to get
priority to make sure that we are addressing every one of those
issues and abate them as quickly as we can.
Senator Carper. All right. Thanks.
Mr. Owen, I am convinced that you recognize the vital role
that your agency plays in addressing this, but really the same
question that I just asked for Mr. Cintron. Please discuss how
CBP plans to address our findings and recommendations as they
pertain to your agency.
Mr. Owen. Yes. Similar to the Postal Service, the key is
the advanced information, so we will continue to work with them
on not only ensuring that the level is going up, but to Mr.
Siemer's point, the accuracy and the timeliness of that data,
so we can be more effective with the targeting, and then as
well, designing the protocols to make sure that every package
we ask for inspection is presented to us for inspection.
Senator Carper. All right. A question for both you--and
this is my last question--for both of you, Mr. Cintron and Mr.
Owen. Have your agencies agreed to performance measurement
system at least for trafficking the number of packages the
Postal Service presents to CBP for inspection? And if yes,
explain what you have agreed to, and if not, maybe you could
explain why not.
Do you want to go first, Mr. Owen?
Mr. Owen. Yes. We are still in those discussions. Really
the issue is the actionable holds versus the holds. When we
place a shipment on hold, of course, we expect to see it. The
challenge becomes as if the data was not provided prior to
arrival or if the date targeting was not done until after the
cargo arrived. Then we have a challenge for the Postal Service
to retrieve that.
So the ultimate end state and where we are going and where
this is working is that, again, the data is presented prior to
arrival. We target prior to arrival, and then the Postal
Service will capture that. There is no disagreement in that. It
is that gray space that what happens when the data came in late
or the targeting was late, how do we account for that, so that
is just the one area.
But again, the ultimate objective here is to have that data
pre-arrival, the targeting done pre-arrival, and then there is
no disagreement that in those cases, those shipments would be
presented to CBP.
Senator Carper. All right. Thanks.
Briefly, Mr. Cintron.
Mr. Cintron. Really, the only piece to add onto that are
the other developments that we are doing to go beyond the ISC.
If the timing is off and we have the ability to capture before
we get it all the way to delivery, that is really where the
focus is going to be. We are definitely in agreement and
getting to those metrics that we can agree on.
Senator Carper. Good.
I am going to close and just say, Mr. Chairman, thank you
for your continued leadership on this front. It is vitally
important, for the hats that you have worn in this fight.
I want to thank your staffs on the kind of collaboration
that they have demonstrated, I hope with our leadership, to
help address this challenge and to bring a sense of urgency to
it.
The Chairman said earlier--he said there is no silver
bullet, and that is obviously true. I like to say--and it is
not just on this front, but with a lot of challenges, no silver
bullet. A lot of silver BBs, and some of them are bigger than
others. Today, we have identified some of those, and some of
them are bigger than others.
In Delaware, we are big on the letter ``C.'' I do not know
why, but we are big on the letter ``C.'' But we call it the
Delaware way, to communicate, compromise, collaborate, and the
letter ``C'' actually can be really helpful here for all of us,
you as well as us. And that is to communicate better, and I
hope this hearing is helpful in that, to better coordinate and
find other ways to collaborate. If we do those three things, we
will be better off.
This hearing started 2\1/2\ hours ago. I am told that five
people die every hour. Five people die every hour from this
opioid epidemic, which means 12 or 13, people have died since
we just started this hearing. They are somebody's mom or dad,
somebody's brother or sister, somebody's son or daughter, niece
or nephew. They are real people, and just keep them in mind.
Keep their faces in mind and their stories in mind as we put
the pedal to the metal and move forward.
Thank you very much.
Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Portman. Thank you, Senator Carper, thank you for
not just cooperation on the report but your input on the
report. You and your staff made this report not just bipartisan
but nonpartisan, and we were able to dig much deeper, so thank
you.
Among the exhibits we talked about today was Exhibit 1.
This was a State Department memo, so I would like to enter this
into the record, without objection.\1\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The memo appears in the Appendix on page 205.
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We were talking a moment ago about the 20 percent, and that
is a concern in terms of Customs and Border Protection having
to finally find the data to be able to find the package and
then having the package already delivered or otherwise
unavailable.
What is your experience with the FedExes, UPSs, and DHLs of
the world, the so-called express consignment operators? Our
report indicates that you do not have that slippage or that
leakage in that case. Is that accurate?
Mr. Owen. Yes, that is correct. The presentation rate from
the express couriers is about 100 percent. I mean, they are
very effective.
What I think is important to note and to remember is that
they have been at this since 2002 with the passage of the trade
act of 2002 that required the express courier operators to
provide that advance data.
I can tell you from my personal experience in those early
years as they were ramping up to meet this new requirement,
they struggled with a lot of the same issues, with having
everybody providing the data, the data being accurate, being
timely, and finding the parcels that customs was looking for to
hold.
When I look at the success the express couriers have had
over the last 10, 12, or 15 years, I see that as a model that
we can employ and we are employing in dealing with the Postal
Service.
They have come a long way. They are very effective at
identifying or helping us to track down those shipments. I feel
we will be just as confident in the near future with the Postal
Service as well.
Senator Portman. I appreciate your confidence, and I hope
that this hearing helps to focus on that issue because
ultimately we want to make sure that data is usable, as Mr.
Siemer has said. He has had to clean up a lot of data--to use
his data analytics to be able to make this work, and I am sure
you all have done the same thing. CBP has also had to clean up
some data, as I understand it, so getting better data and then
ensuring that once you have the data, it is actually used. That
model that you have with these private couriers obviously is
something we ought to be looking at, if it is working from a
management point of view, more effectively to present those
packages.
The final thing I want to say is about a trip to Hong Kong
that our staff made because Hong Kong is one of those
transshipment points, and they were meeting with the Hong Kong
customs officials. They talked about a few things I thought
were interesting.
One is that there had been a bust working with DEA and
with, as I understand it, Department of Homeland Security as
well, and that was a very successful bust in the sense that
they were able to break up some kind of network going between
China and Hong Kong, transshipping to the United States.
But there has only been one, and also their attitude, I
would tell you--and, Mr. Murphy, you will appreciate this.
Their attitude was that, ``Do not worry. It is under control.''
That was the quote of the customs official, the most senior
customs official that our staff was able to interview. Clearly
not under control, but again, this goes to the attitude of some
of our foreign partners.
Finally, the fact that this advanced electronic data, as
important as it is to Commissioner Owen, to finding this
poison, getting it off track, it is also really important to
your prosecutions.
Mr. Nevano, maybe you can speak to that for a second. The
Homeland Security Inspections, your special agents at
facilities like the international service centers we have
talked about here could be a lot more effective in their
investigations and in dismantling some of these transnational
criminal networks if they had the advanced electronic data.
Maybe you could just speak to that for a second.
After Customs and Border Protection makes an opioid seizure
at one of these international centers, how does the advanced
data assist you and assist HSI in subsequent criminal
investigations?
Mr. Nevano. Thank you for your question, Senator.
The quicker we get the information, the higher probability
that we have in conducting a successful prosecution. It also
allows us, as Mr. Owen, I believe, stated earlier--to do like a
link analysis or post-seizure analysis where you might be able
to tie the links of a previous seizure, historical information
that may tie a criminal network or transnational criminal
organization.
For example, we may have an organization or a previous
seizure that was in California and this seizure in JFK and New
York, but based on the historical data, we may be able to tie
the organization together to develop a larger organization and
take down a larger organization.
It also helps us from an officer safety standpoint,
Senator. Before our agents go into a home, it is helpful to
know the person that may be inside that residence or business,
what type of criminal history do they have, do they have
weapons, how can we best prepare our special agents for their
security and safety before they actually enact a law
enforcement operation. That would be a significant concern that
we would have, and I think that advanced data helps us in that
aspect, Senator.
Senator Portman. I think that is also important for us to
note today that this is not simply about identifying a package
and taking it offline. It is about the follow-through and the
prosecution. It is critical information to have.
Thank you all for being here. We have many more questions,
and I am sure we are going to be following up with some.
Senator Carper.
Senator Carper. Could I have just another----
Senator Portman. Maybe right now.
Senator Carper. Not a question. Just a comment.
A thought has come to mind, Mr. Chairman, and for our
witnesses: My last year as Governor of Delaware, I was chairman
and vice chairman of the National Governors Association (NGA),
today one of our dear friends, George Voinovich--but there had
been a lawsuit between all 50 States and the tobacco industry.
The lawsuit was an effort by the States collectively to get
money from the tobacco industry to help cover health care costs
States were incurring because of people's addiction to tobacco,
nicotine.
The lawsuit was successful, and not only have the States
received for, I think, 20 years now, a flow of revenues for
mostly health-related issues, but also a foundation was created
called the American Legacy Foundation. The American Legacy
Foundation was created. I was to be the founding vice chairman,
and what we did is we went to work with young people all over
the country to figure out if there is a way we could mount a
multimedia campaign, not just Internet, not just films, not
just television, not just print media, but a multimedia
campaign to reduce the incidence of tobacco use by young
people. If they are using it, get them to stop. If they had not
started, to make sure that they did not start. It was hugely
successful.
And the key was hard hitting, direct messaging, right to
the target audience, and we saw a dramatic drop in youth
smoking, tobacco use, and it has actually persisted. It has
actually persisted over the years.
I always like to say find out what works, do more of that.
If we are looking at a multilayered strategy, maybe part of
that is just to do a better job messaging to the target
audience, what is at risk here for them, for their lives and
for their families, and we have something that actually works
in doing just that.
Thank you.
Senator Portman. So true. Thank you all again for being
here, and again, we have some follow up questions we will be
providing. We appreciate your responsiveness, not just today,
but in the course of our investigation.
We shared our report with all of you in advance, and we
appreciate the fact that you made some edits that you thought
were appropriate, including to be sure we were not providing
information that was inappropriate, that in any way, even if it
was not classified, sensitive information.
But I just want you to know this has been a collaborative
effort not just with Senator Carper and myself but with our
partners in the Federal Government who have the job every day
to try to protect us from this opioid epidemic. We need to
continue to work together and work together in smarter ways.
We are better than this. We can do a better job, and when
you think about what is happening around our country today with
40,000 Americans dying of overdoses--and that is the tip of the
ice berg, frankly, as tragic as that is, that so many other
lives are ruined, taken off track, and tremendous cost to our
community and our families being broken apart. We have to do
everything we can.
Senator Carper talked earlier about all hands on deck. This
is that time. This is that moment. We have to change the way we
are operating to provide this information to be able to stop
these packages. We have to be able to prosecute those who are
perpetrating these acts on our citizens. We have to do much
more in terms of the prevention side, as Senator Carper said,
and getting people the treatment they need to stop this
addiction. All of that is important, but here is one thing we
know we can do, and that is to tighten up our own Postal
Service to be able to stop some of this poison from coming in,
as was said earlier, and have an immediate impact on the price
on the street, because one of the reasons fentanyl is pushing
out heroin in Ohio, I will tell you, is the cost. It is not
just that it is more powerful, but it is less costly.
I am proud of the staff who worked on this report. I want
to particularly thank HSI Special Agent Mancuso for his work on
this.
I will tell you, Mr. Nevano, we are going to miss him when
he goes back to HSI. His contributions were invaluable.
I just want to thank all the staff who were involved, and,
Senator Carper, I would like you to comment on your team who
are involved, and I am going to comment on ours briefly.
Senator Carper. Thanks. Thanks so much.
Our team led by John Kilvington, our staff director for our
Subcommittee on the Democratic side--Portia, sitting right
behind me, and, of course, we are grateful to you. Felicia
Hawkins, Roberto Berrios, and thank you all, not just for the
work that you have done but the collaboration and a sense of
spirit and a team that we have seen demonstrated with our
colleagues on the majority side. Thank you.
Senator Portman. And our team, I want to thank Andy
Polesovsky for his work, Will Dargusch, Lenny Mancuso--I talked
about earlier--and Patrick Warren.
Andy, you did not put your name down there.
I thank them for all their hard work on this report.
The hearing record will remain open for 15 days for any
additional comments or questions of any of the Subcommittee
Members, and again, thank you for your testimony today and for
your service on behalf of our country.
This hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:35 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
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