MIAMI - The number of migrants traveling illegally to the United States through a treacherous sea pass has dropped by half, largely because of a fingerprinting initiative that will expand to South Florida in the spring, Coast Guard officials said Wednesday.
The biometric program began a year ago and has led to the prosecutions of 93 migrants picked up in the Mona Passage - a slip of sea often used by men and women from the Dominican Republic to enter Puerto Rico and then the U.S. mainland, illegally.
Use of illegal migration route cut by half, Coast Guard says -- South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com