Mr O'Rourke, working with a few business-friendly Texas Republicans, helped pass a law allowing El Paso and a few other pilot cities and airports to pay overtime for CBP officers in peak periods.
But this reporter found CBP officers in El Paso as puzzled by the alarm as anyone.
Fewer TSA employees and grumpy, unpaid CBP officers is, needless to say, a recipe for long lines and hugely unpleasant air travel.
CBP officers will ask the travellers a serious of health questions about their exposure to Ebola and trained medical personnel will take their temperature with an FDA-approved non-contact thermometer, CDC director Tom Frieden said at press conference on Wednesday afternoon.
CBP officers are charged with enforcing not only immigration and customs laws, but they enforce over 400 laws for 40 other agencies.
A US Customs and Border Patrol spokesman told Guardian Australia: "CBP officers have discretionary authority to determine if a foreign national crew member meets all admissibility requirements including their intent to return to the vessel".
CBP officers even have the right to demand a traveller's passwords and encryption keys to their electronic devices.
The response is unlikely to satisfy Khalifa, who predicted CBP officers themselves would one day use the technology.
Australian Customs and Border Protection (CBP) services and related rescue agencies need to improve interagency co-ordination of rescues of asylum seekers in distress, internal reviews into three fatal boat sinkings have said.
The internal reviews released late on Friday afternoon assessed the actions of CBP, border protection command (BPC) and related Defence assets during three incidents at sea in June and July of this year.
Different agencies were merged to create a behemoth, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), with Border Patrol agents (quasi-paramilitaries in green uniforms) guarding the frontier, and CBP officers (in dark blue) to man air, land and sea ports of entry, screening hundreds of millions of passengers and trade flows worth trillions of dollars.
