Potential Danger in DHS Religious Visa Program
By Douglas Farah
The Boston Globe has a deeply disturbing article on another one of the gaping loopholes that give radical Islamists unfettered, easy access to the United States-the little-known R or Religious Visa, that allows visitors to enter the United States with minimal scrutiny if they claim to belong to a religious order.
The program has been riddled with abuse for years, and a 1999 GAO report found wide-spread fraud, which has since not been addressed. The 1999 GAO report highlighted persistent lapses in oversight. "Neither INS nor [the] State [Department] knows the overall extent of fraud in the religious worker visa program," the report concluded.
The Globe report, based on an internal DHS review of the program said "The probe found a particularly high fraud rate among applicants from countries the government deemed to pose a security risk, such as Egypt, Algeria, Pakistan, Syria and Iraq, the report found. There were 11 applications for people from special-risk countries among the 220 petitions that were audited -- and 8 of those 11 were fraudulent, it said."
Michelle Malkin reports that the program has already been exploited to illegally bring in more than 200 Islamic applicants. My full blog is here.
TrackBack
