CBP - Unified Immigration Portal (UIP)
Investment ID: 024-000005284
Overview
Program Title
CBP - Unified Immigration Portal (UIP)
Description
The Unified Immigration Portal (UIP) program (Management and Administration Line of Business) supports the CBP mission to ensure timely and accurate immigration data is used in making critical immigration decisions and efficiently processing individuals. It supports the part of the mission that is focused on reducing individuals Time in Custody and enabling access to key immigration data that results in quicker and smarter decision making by both operators in the field and agency executives. UIP is designed to be a cross-agency program, owned by CBP, that facilitates data sharing between agencies with immigration-focused missions including, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Department of Justice (DOJ). The program is vital to providing enhanced access to shared and transparent data that enables a complete understanding of an individual s immigration journey.
Type of Program
Major IT Investments
Multi-Agency Category
Not Applicable
Associated Websites
uip.cbp.dhs.gov/
Investment Detail
Since the program was stood up so quickly with significant executive support, a formal CBA/ROI was bypassed. Prior to FOC, the program should complete a formal CBA/ROI to further quantify the cost savings of the program or obtain a waiver.
Stakeholders in the immigration ecosystem historically collected and stored information in silos, creating an environment in which agencies lacked comprehensive and consistent access to critical data necessary to make impactful decisions. The primary benefit of UIP is to ensure timely and accurate immigration data is being shared within the immigration ecosystem across CBP, ICE, USCIS, and HHS and being used to inform operational decision-making by over 5,300 users. UIP brokers data from 4 of those agencies (Metric ID: 134458) and shares 24 data sources (Metric ID: 135702). UIP streams the data from source systems to UIP within 20 minutes (Metric ID: 134459), has an uptime of 99.9% (Metric ID: 134460), and has a system reliability of 99.8% (Metric ID: 135701). Without UIP, the ecosystem faces three main challenges:
Lack of end-to-end view of the immigration process hindering the government's ability to understand where limited resources should be allocated to alleviate bottlenecks.
Limited insight into populations moving between agencies furthering bottlenecks and backlogs, making it harder to improve interagency coordination, and making individual status tracking difficult
Inconsistencies in interagency analysis and reporting leading to heightened scrutiny from oversight and executive bodies.
UIP allows for the following key benefits relating to cost avoidance and cost savings:
Cloud-native, scalable infrastructure allows for easy reuse across the federal government, as other partner agencies can utilize the Databricks environment for their own purposes rather than investing in additional platforms.
UIP document sharing and signing services will allow agencies to process individuals and reduce reliance on manually printed, signed, and exchanged forms more rapidly.
31M+ calls to UIP data-sharing services automate previously manual processes to enhance efficiency and reduce errors. Reducing errors from manual data entry can be directly traced to saving agents and officer time during duplicative entry, but it can also save countless manhours attributed towards resolving data discrepancies and omissions.
Dashboarding and data visualization enhancements will allow leadership to identify operational bottlenecks more easily and will help them anticipate potential resource demands during surges in immigration resulting in cost avoidance for the immigration ecosystem.
UIP has played a critical role in addressing surges at the Southwest Border in 2019 and early 2021. DHS is spearheading efforts to accelerate throughput, digitize and automate processes such as documentation approval, enhance subject identification capabilities, unite families, and enhance interagency reporting for executive bodies. Continued investment into UIP will enable new capability development to bolster ongoing Southwest Border efforts. Furthermore, funding to enable the modernization efforts across CBP, ICE, and USCIS is critical to enable digitization, ingesting additional data sets into UIP, and advancing existing data analysis and reporting capabilities.
According to the UIP Cost Estimate, the primary cost is development labor and secondary costs include software procurement and cloud services.
Stakeholders in the immigration ecosystem historically collected and stored information in silos, creating an environment in which agencies lacked comprehensive and consistent access to critical data necessary to make impactful decisions. The primary benefit of UIP is to ensure timely and accurate immigration data is being shared within the immigration ecosystem across CBP, ICE, USCIS, and HHS and being used to inform operational decision-making by over 5,300 users. UIP brokers data from 4 of those agencies (Metric ID: 134458) and shares 24 data sources (Metric ID: 135702). UIP streams the data from source systems to UIP within 20 minutes (Metric ID: 134459), has an uptime of 99.9% (Metric ID: 134460), and has a system reliability of 99.8% (Metric ID: 135701). Without UIP, the ecosystem faces three main challenges:
Lack of end-to-end view of the immigration process hindering the government's ability to understand where limited resources should be allocated to alleviate bottlenecks.
Limited insight into populations moving between agencies furthering bottlenecks and backlogs, making it harder to improve interagency coordination, and making individual status tracking difficult
Inconsistencies in interagency analysis and reporting leading to heightened scrutiny from oversight and executive bodies.
UIP allows for the following key benefits relating to cost avoidance and cost savings:
Cloud-native, scalable infrastructure allows for easy reuse across the federal government, as other partner agencies can utilize the Databricks environment for their own purposes rather than investing in additional platforms.
UIP document sharing and signing services will allow agencies to process individuals and reduce reliance on manually printed, signed, and exchanged forms more rapidly.
31M+ calls to UIP data-sharing services automate previously manual processes to enhance efficiency and reduce errors. Reducing errors from manual data entry can be directly traced to saving agents and officer time during duplicative entry, but it can also save countless manhours attributed towards resolving data discrepancies and omissions.
Dashboarding and data visualization enhancements will allow leadership to identify operational bottlenecks more easily and will help them anticipate potential resource demands during surges in immigration resulting in cost avoidance for the immigration ecosystem.
UIP has played a critical role in addressing surges at the Southwest Border in 2019 and early 2021. DHS is spearheading efforts to accelerate throughput, digitize and automate processes such as documentation approval, enhance subject identification capabilities, unite families, and enhance interagency reporting for executive bodies. Continued investment into UIP will enable new capability development to bolster ongoing Southwest Border efforts. Furthermore, funding to enable the modernization efforts across CBP, ICE, and USCIS is critical to enable digitization, ingesting additional data sets into UIP, and advancing existing data analysis and reporting capabilities.
According to the UIP Cost Estimate, the primary cost is development labor and secondary costs include software procurement and cloud services.