Border security is, obviously, about keeping some things out of the country, but at the same time the borders must be open enough to facilitate the movement of legitimate trade and travel.
This is not an easy balance to strike even in the best of times.
Border enforcement requires protecting nearly 7,000 miles of border between the United States and Canada to the North and Mexico to the south, plus another 2,000 miles of coastal waters around the Florida peninsula and southern Californian coast.
Needless to say, achieving a balance between border security and legitimate entrance into the country is going to take a lot of work.
On a typical day, border enforcement officials must process more than a million passengers and pedestrians, tens of thousands of truck, rail, and sea containers, and somehow detect whether or not any of them are carrying drugs, agricultural pests, illicit currency, or other prohibited materials.
Somehow they have to work their way through all this and yet still allow the legitimate travelers and materials quickly into the country.
Every year the efforts to tighten up border security has led to thousands of pounds of seized narcotics, the arrests of a large number of criminals, and the apprehension of thousands of people at and between the ports for illegal entry.
Unfortunately, as all these people and cargo containers are processed, it can seriously slow down and inconvenience everyone and everything else that can legitimately enter the country.
Nothing is worse than having to wade through miles of red tape when you know there is no reason to direct extra security your way.
But border security agents have no way of knowing this before they actually take the time to process each individual traveler or container.
Every year there are new technologies that are helping streamline the border enforcement programs - technologies that allow agents to process items faster or patrol wider areas of land or sea without actually physically going there.
This may have helped speed up the process, but there are still some concerns about how the technology is used.
In other words, there is another balance that border security officials have to address, the balance between security and privacy.
Is it possible for border enforcement policies to check into shipments, containers, and peoples' backgrounds without causing a serious violation of their privacy? When it comes to security, is a little breach in privacy worth it? These are the kinds of questions that are debated every day in this country.
There has to be a balance between so many different facets of trade, privacy, and sovereignty that there doesn't seem to be an answer that will satisfy everyone.
Until an answer is devised, though, the boarder security officers will continue to do what they can to protect the boarders of the country.