Connecting the dots: biometrics--once the province of spy thrillers--comes to the U.S.-Mexican border.

Manuel Garcia is having a bad day at the border. He's gotten popped trying his third illegal crossing, this time at the San Ysidro border patrol station south of San Diego. In a back room, a uniformed officer rolls his fingers--all 10, one at a time--onto a glass plate that looks like a supermarket price scanner. On a recessed screen, the whorls of his prints show up immediately as digital images. The prints automatically match against U.S. government databases thousands of miles away.

In about a minute, the officer has Garcia cold. Up come previous attempts to cross under several aliases, along with pictures from those arrests. He's a got a rap sheet, too, a car theft. She holds up an eyeball-shaped digital camera wired to the computer, and Garcia's fourth arrest and photo is on the record, visible immediately at border stations and airports across the United States. Back to Tijuana he goes.

Biometrics, now a US$1.20 billion industry and expected to nearly quadruple in four years, is booming as global terrorism has metastasized since the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. While privacy advocates debate the effectiveness of tracking the thousands of people who come and go from the United States, border officials are relieved that their jobs are finally getting more precise and, in their view, more fair.

Technologies as simple as fingerprint scans and as exotic as facial scans and, eventually, radio-frequency tags, are being rolled out across the United States. San Ysidro is a kind of testing ground for technologies, in part because of the number of people going back and forth over the U.S.-Mexican border, and in part because the place is physically punishing on technology, compared to a climate-controlled airport. And, border agents say, because San Ysidro needs biometrics to speed up what can be up to a two-hour process for anyone coming north.

"Obviously, we're a major smuggling corridor," says Adele Fasano, San Ysidro's director. "People try to smuggle here from all over the world because Tijuana has an established smuggling infrastructure" In the offices hang photos of illegal immigrants stuffed in dashboards and hanging from the bottom of trucks, but the sadder cases involve children being smuggled across to waiting parents. A four-year-old was found stuffed in a pinata; a mother and baby were literally welded inside a gas tank.

San Ysidro relies a lot, still, on officers' judgment, what Fasano calls "layered enforcement." People whose biometric data checks out quickly and cleanly, and who pass a general smell test from experienced officers, move on quickly. Those who don't go straight to secondary inspection. If something is really amiss, it's time for fingerprints. "The only way you can get a high certainty with biometrics is with more than one" says Fasano.

Finger scan and facial recognition technology, which is more complex, is being tested on the pedestrian side of the station, a kind of speed lane for walk-ins. Fingerprints used to be taken with ink and faxed to Washington, D.C. If a reply came at all, it was months later. Crossing cards, too, once a blurry picture in a laminated sleeve, have gotten updated with microchips containing reams of personal data. The border officer asks the person to lay a finger on a small print-reader, and it's a match or it's not. "Little by little, we're plugging all the holes" says Fasano. "It's going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to cross the border illegally."

There's a speed lane for cars, too. Sixty thousand regular crossers have submitted to background checks that take two years to complete. A transponder similar to one used to pay highway tolls approves the car, while a camera snaps the license plate and reads it into the system.

By the time the car lurches forward a few yards to the officer, a screen shows make, model, license and other information, as well as photos of everyone allowed to be in the car. A quick visual once-over and, in most cases, it's seven seconds total at the gate. The normal visual inspection process used to take 40 seconds. Fasano figures that as many as 300,000 San Diego border crossers could enter the system, and that 50% could qualify for expedited crossing. She's already adding two additional speed lanes. A radioactive materials detector will be operational by the end of 2005.

Filtering out those who cross using false identification used to be strictly a matter of luck Catching a criminal was even more uncommon. Now officers catch them all the time, 1,000 last year. "The beauty of the fingerprinting is that if a person has done a crime and they walk through here, we nail them" says San Ysidro Assistant Director Bruce Ward. "Where else in the country do we have the capability to screen such volumes of people?" One recent morning, a bank robber wanted in Missouri and Michigan--a U.S. citizen--made the mistake of coming north through San Ysidro. He was arrested.

Abuses. The problem, say border agents, is people heading south, not north. Cars fly through at highway speeds, so a migrant on a six-month tourist visa can start a life in the United States then go back to Mexico every six months and get another visa, no records. The photo-and-fingerprint system familiar to air travelers is being implemented at 50 land ports in the United States, which should curtail those abuses.

Antonio Cantera, 43, crosses one morning at San Ysidro to visit relatives in Pomona, California. An engineer, he fully supports increasing biometric systems at crossings. "It's the best way to reduce crime. It's faster, and the treatment you get is more humane," says Cantera. He crosses in 10 minutes now, compared to a half-hour wait before biometrics.

As for having his name and information in distant U.S. government databases, Cantera is utterly unconcerned. "It's more secure than paper," he says.

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GREG BROWN * SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA