However, he said his division will have to be provided the funding for the salaries of the displaced local immigration officers.
In an interview yesterday, Muna said Customs needs to hire 15 individuals to help man all of the CNMI’s points of entries .
At the airport alone, where Customs officers work 24 hours a day, Muna said they are short staffed and have to deploy personnel from the seaport and the post offices.
He said since the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will be handling local immigration services starting on June 1, the CNMI no longer has to allocate a budget for local immigration.
At least a portion of this budget can be provided to Customs so it can hire some of the displaced immigration employees, Muna said.
Sixty-eight local immigration employees are scheduled to lose their job on June 1 — 37 of them failed to meet the federal government’s age requirement.
Of the 28 qualified to take the written test, only half were able to take it. The failure rate was 50 percent.
The governor has sued the federal government to prevent the implementation of the federalization law.
