Federal officials admit they've lost track of how many foreign
visitors overstay their visas every year despite a nearly
20-year-old law requiring the government to develop a tracking
system,
The New York Times reports.
Federal agencies haven't even provided a new report to Congress on
overstays since 1994, the Times reports.
"Since 1996, Congress has required that an exit system be put in
place to determine visa overstays," the
House Oversight Committee sternly noted prior
to a hearing on the issue Dec. 17.
"The biometric exit system has yet to be put in place, and DHS has
failed to issue a mandated report to Congress on the number of
overstays who remain in the U.S. in violation of the law."
Lawmakers worry radical Islamic terrorists could exploit the visa
program because the United States doesn't routinely collect
biometric information on people leaving the country including
fingerprints, iris scans and photographs.
And at the Dec. 17
House Oversight hearing, an official revealed
that of 9,500 visas revoked over terrorism concerns since 2001, the
United States doesn't know where all those former visa-holders are.
"Having accurate data on who is coming and going not who is
pretending to be coming and going is essential to curtailing the
insidious and increasing direct threat that ISIS is loudly declaring
at our homeland," Janice Kephart, former counsel for the Senate
Judiciary Committee and a staff member on the 9/11 Commission,
warned Congress last year, the Times reports.
At the House oversight hearing last month, however, Alan Bersin, the
assistant secretary for international affairs at DHS, conceded "we
don't know" when asked about the number of visa overstays.
One 1997 report by the Immigration and Naturalization Service puts
the number of people who overstay their visas at 40 percent, about
4.4 million of an estimated illegal immigrants currently in the
United States, the Times reports.
Bersin told congressional lawmakers a report on overstay rates
first promised in 2013 by former secretary of Homeland Security
Janet Napolitano would come out in the next six months.
According to the Times, officials blame the lack of a tracking
system on a lack of technology, resistance from the airline and
tourism industry because of cost, and questions about the
usefulness of tracking people leaving the country as a
counterterrorism measure.
Yet the urgency for tracking was first outlined by the 9/11
Commission, which recommended the Department of Homeland
Security complete an entry and exit tracking system "as soon as
possible," the Times reports, adding two 9/11 hijackers, Satam
al-Suqami and Nawaf al-Hazmi, had overstayed their visas.
Since then, "millions" have been spent in the effort, but
officials can still only estimate the number of overstays, the
Times reports.
"U.S. airports and other entry and exit points were never
designed with departure control in mind," Theresa Cardinal
Brown, the director of Immigration Policy at the Bipartisan
Policy Center in Washington and a Department of Homeland
Security official under President George W. Bush, tells the
Times.
"If we want to do that its going to mean building a lot more
infrastructure."
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