Immigration Fraud and Terror?Yet Again

By Bill West

Not that anyone with common sense needed a reminder, but yesterday�s unsealing of a Federal indictment in New York against three defendants already in custody in Britain, charging them with four terrorism-related counts plotting to attack financial institution targets in New York, New Jersey and Washington, DC, clearly shows the linkage between immigration violations and national security threats against the United States. Count one of that indictment, which is available for review here on the CT Blog, charges �Conspiracy to Use Weapons of Mass Destruction Against Persons Within the United States.�

In the �Overt Acts� section of Count One, Defendant Dhiren Barot, who is alleged to be a lead al-Qaeda operative, �in or about June 2000�applied to a college in New York in order to conceal the true purpose of his subsequent trips to the United States and was later admitted for the 2000 and 2001 school years, but never enrolled or attended any classes at the college.� Further, �on or about August 17, 2000, Dhiren Barot and Nadeem Tarmohamed, the defendants, entered the United States at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, arriving on the same flight from the United Kingdom, and listed the same New York hotel on their immigration forms.�

Further overt act allegations in the indictment relate to the defendants� entry into and departure from the U.S. at various times so they could conduct surveillance against potential targets. Assuming the allegations in the indictment are true, every time the defendants entered the US, they committed immigration fraud by misrepresenting their intended purpose. Apart from that, Defendant Barot, by allegedly obtaining a student visa by clear and blatant fraud, and using that visa to enter the U.S. to further his terrorism efforts, is one of the clearest examples yet of abuse of the student visa system by terror suspects since the 9-11 hijackers.

Barot allegedly never enrolled nor attended the college wherein the visa issuance was based. This was in 2000 and 2001, presumably before the 9-11 attacks. Did that college report his non-attendance to the INS at the time? If so, did INS conduct any follow up investigative action? Even if the college made a routine notification to INS, it is highly unlikely that INS would have done anything with that information at the time, since such student visa violations, pre-911, were barely given a glance by INS enforcement personnel; there simply were too many such violations, too many other priorities and not enough resources to devote to such matters.

Which raises another interesting question. Post 9-11, the Government has made much of �cracking down� on student visa violators. Indeed, an enhanced computer tracking system was ramped up requiring colleges to make real-time reports of visa violators to ICE (INS� DHS successor). ICE, however, is mired in its own internal mission struggles. Is it really focusing on and tracking down large numbers of student visa violators? The answer is no.

And, what does this mean for the larger issue of the US VISIT departure control system? US VISIT, the biometric nonimmigrant entry/exit control system that supposedly will track temporary foreign visitors to the U.S., was implemented soon after 9-11. The departure control part, the other �big half,� is still only in the test phase and will not likely be fully operational for another several years. Reliable analysis over the years has established that over 40% of the illegal alien population within the U.S. started out as nonimmigrant visa entrants�meaning they originally entered the U.S. with a �valid� temporary visa and simply overstayed their authorized time or otherwise violated their status.

This does not bode well for enforcement follow up with US VISIT. Presumably, at some point the departure control system will be fully operational. That means the system will dutifully report nearly real-time non-departures of very many temporary entrant aliens to some element of the DHS. What then? What will happen to that huge body of violator lead information, among which will surely be some potential terror suspects like the defendants described in the just unsealed New York indictment? Currently, the investigative agency for DHS, ICE, is hardly capable of handling such a new mission, at least not without standing down from some other missions or without getting a large influx of new resources. And, such raw violator information will clearly require solid intelligence analysis to ferret out the genuine potential terror threats from the potential hotel housekeepers. And, since the US VISIT departure control system is still years from being operational, what about all those entrant violators since 9-11 that are being �lost� to the system now? Are there any plans to even try to look at those?

As noted at the beginning of this article, this latest New York indictment has again reminded us that immigration law violations are often inextricably linked to national security threats. Our political leaders and Government policy makers in the national security arena should always remember that.

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