US still without way to track foreign visitors
No fix found for security loophole
DALLAS - Eight years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and despite repeated mandates from Congress, the United States still has no reliable system for determining whether millions of foreign visitors leave the country after their visas expire.
New concern was focused on that security loophole last week, when Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a 19-year-old Jordanian who had overstayed his tourist visa, was accused in court of plotting to blow up a Dallas skyscraper. Last year alone, 2.9 million foreign visitors on temporary visas like Smadi’s checked in to the country but never officially checked out, immigration officials said. While officials say they have no way to confirm it, they suspect that several hundred thousand of them overstayed their visas.
Overall, the officials said, about 40 percent of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States came on legal visas and overstayed.
Smadi’s case has brought renewed calls from both parties in Congress for Department of Homeland Security officials to complete a universal electronic exit monitoring system.
Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, the senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said the Smadi case “points to a real need for an entry and exit system if we are serious about reducing illegal immigration.’’
Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat who chairs the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on immigration, said he would try to steer money from the economic stimulus program to build an exit monitoring system.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, immigration authorities, with more than $1 billion from Congress, have greatly improved and expanded their systems to monitor foreigners when they arrive. But there are no biometric inspections or systematic follow-up to confirm that foreign visitors have departed.
Security officials caution that universal exit monitoring would be daunting and costly, mainly because of the nation’s long and busy land borders, with more than 1 million crossings every day. The wrong exit plan, they said, could clog trade, disrupt border cities, and overwhelm immigration agencies with information they could not use.
Since 2004, Homeland Security officials have put systems in place to check all foreigners as they arrive, whether by air, sea, or land. Customs officers now take fingerprints and digital photos of visitors from most countries, instantly comparing them against law enforcement watch-list databases. Canadians and Mexicans with special border-crossing cards are exempt from those checks.
But Homeland Security officials said that a series of pilot programs since 2004 had failed to yield an exit-monitoring system that would work for the whole nation. They have not yet found technology to support speedy exit inspections at land borders. And airlines balked at an effort last year by the Bush administration to make them responsible for taking fingerprints and photographs of departing foreigners.
Last year, official figures showed, 39 million foreign travelers were admitted on temporary visas like Smadi’s. Homeland Security officials said they confirmed the departure of 92.5 percent of them. Most of the remaining visitors did depart, officials said, but failed to check out because they did not know how to do so. But more than 200,000 of them are believed to have overstayed intentionally.
Immigration authorities have put in a place a separate system for keeping track of foreigners who, unlike Smadi, come on student visas. That system has proved effective, officials say.
Immigration analysts said that given the difficulties of enforcing the United States’ vast borders, it remained primarily up to law enforcement officials to thwart suspected terrorists who did not have records that would draw scrutiny before they entered the United States.
“You can’t ask the immigration system to do everything,’’ said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a research center in Washington, and a former commissioner of the immigration service.
Smadi caught the attention of the FBI by posting on Jihadist websites incendiary remarks about wanting to kill Americans. Over the summer, he met with agents posing as members of Al Qaeda and planned to bomb the Fountain Place office building in downtown Dallas, according to an indictment unsealed on Thursday. His arrest on terrorism charges on Sept. 24 came after he parked a truck he had been told was carrying explosives in the building’s underground garage, according to court documents.
