The US government is seeking direct access to police databases in other countries, as a condition of inclusion in the US Visa Waiver Program (VWP). Citizens of countries in the VWP are allowed to enter the US for limited short visits under the without having to apply or pay for standard visas to the US. So inclusion in the VWP is a valuable incentive the US can use to pressure other countries to make other concessions to the US.

The US says that any country not agreeing to a so-called Enhanced Border Security Partnership (EBSP) giving the US government access to its domestic police database by the end of 2026 will be expelled from, or not admitted to, the VWP.

The first EBSP agreement was signed in September 2025 between the US and Bahrain. The European Union authorized EBSP negotiations with the US in December 2025, despite concerns raised in September 2025 in an opinion by the European Data Protection Supervisor. EBSP negotiations are ongoing between the US and other countries in the VWP.

There’s been almost no discussion in the US of the EBSP negotiations or agreements. None of these agreements have been submitted to the US Senate for ratification as treaties.

The most detailed reporting about EBSP has come from Europe and has been based on documents from European governments.  This presentation at the 39C3 conference earlier this month in Germany by Matthias Monroy gives a good overview of what’s known and the questions that remain.

Labeling these agreements “partnerships” implies reciprocity. But most criminal investigations in the US are carried out by state or local police and aren’t included in any national database. The NCIC database hosted by the FBI is an index to records of arrests, convictions, and court orders such as warrants, but doesn’t identify people who are being investigated but for whom no warrant has been issued. As a result, EBSP agrrements will give US authorities access to much more information about foreigners in countries with entralized police record-keeping than foreign governments will get about people in the US.

The announcement of the signing of the USA-Bahrain EBSP agreement says that it “facilitates the automated exchange of biometric data between Bahrain and DHS”. The EBSP agreements thus provide a self-justifying pretext for integration of the US government’s biometric databases, in order to make them available to foreign police.

US data will be made available not just to democratic foreign governments but to ones like Bahrain — a repressive regime in which the hereditary monarch rules by decree. The US says that data sharing pursuant to the EBSP will “safeguard both countries”, but Bahraini dissidents and asylum seekers probably won’t see it that way. Once data is disclosed by the US to foreign authorities, there’s no way for the US to control, or even to know, how or against whom it’s used, or with which other repressive regimes it’s shared.