National Security and Immigration - No Doubts

By Bill West

ABC News has reported that al-Qaeda in Iraq may have attempted to infiltrate terrorist operatives into the United States to conduct attacks by utilizing student visas to effect entry into this country, much the same way many of the 9/11 terrorist hijackers entered the US. The report stated that US military forces captured documents last year during a raid in Iraq that indicated terrorist plans by al-Qaeda for operations inside the US.

That al-Qaeda continues to view the exploitation of America’s student visa system as a potential mechanism for infiltrating its operatives into this country is both disturbing and not surprising. For all the rhetoric about increased border security and enhanced immigration enforcement efforts since the 9/11 attacks, the reality is that not much is much improved from 9/10/2001. Relative to the student visa process, there is an automated reporting mechanism requiring schools to report foreign students that do not report or who drop out or otherwise violate their status. That system, however, is only as good as the integrity and competence of the school officials who manage and input the violator information on the front end.

On the receiving end of that foreign student violator information are Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immigration authorities. At some point, presumably that violator information is scrubbed through various Intelligence and law enforcement databases and those with “hits” would, again presumably, be targeted for aggressive investigation (hopefully those “hits” would have been generated after the alien entered the US and not before, when those same checks should also have been conducted if aggressive visa processing is done). But what of those violators who have a “clean” name and fingerprint history who show up in no adverse database...the way most of the 9/11 hijackers did before the 9/11 attacks?

The simple answer is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not have the agent resources to aggressively target and pursue the majority and certainly not all the foreign student violators who are identified. While there may technically be some minimal locate effort made against some of these violators, it is likely those efforts amount to standard governmental, public and commercial record checks. Genuine field investigative work, “gum shoe” detective work, will be employed only against the most egregious violator suspects. This boils down to resources and priorities. This may be one reason al-Qaeda views our student visa system as a potential weakness in our border defenses.

Another recent case comes from Bakersfield, California. A naturalized US citizen of Yemeni descent, Amen Ahmed Ali, has reportedly been charged by Federal authorities for allegedly acting as a Yemeni agent when illegally attempting to obtain secret documents and military equipment. Ali has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is presumed innocent until proven otherwise in a court of law. The allegations remind us of previous cases involving naturalized US citizens or aliens who applied for naturalization who were subsequently convicted of terrorism-linked or other national security violations. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) support cases of Fawaz Damra, the Cleveland Imam recently deported after his conviction for lying about his links to PIJ on his naturalization documents and the case of Sami Al-Arian, the Tampa professor who pleaded guilty to supporting PIJ after a lengthy and non-determinative trial last year, are two such examples.

In the Bakersfield case, the Assistant US Attorney prosecuting the case stated in a Court hearing that, “Even though he’s a naturalized citizen, that (Yemen) is clearly where his allegiances lie.” The prosecutor further said, “Yes, he was here. Yes, he’s an American citizen, but look...the ties that bind go back to Yemen.” Reportedly, Ali was still a member of the Yemeni military while going through the US naturalization process.

From an immigration perspective, the Bakersfield case, like those PIJ cases also mentioned, brings the process of naturalization itself into consideration. If the Bakersfield case allegations are proven in court by the Government and Ali is convicted, arguably he may not have been eligible to become a naturalized US citizen. Would a thorough background investigation conducted by immigration authorities have uncovered some of these issues in the Ali case earlier? The same could be asked of the noted PIJ cases.

Unfortunately, there is really no such thing as a thorough background investigation in the naturalization process. That hasn’t been for probably two decades or so. What passes for a background investigation is a standard battery of Government database checks conducted by an Adjudication Officer of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services bureau (CIS), the immigration benefit agency of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Prior to DHS, such checks, but fewer of them, were done in essentially the same way by Adjudicators / Examiners of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).

To be fair, if there is a serious “hit” from any of those record checks, the CIS officials are supposed to refer the matter to ICE, the immigration investigative and law enforcement arm of DHS, to conduct a genuine field investigation into the matter. How extensive and thorough such an investigation may be depends on the circumstances of the case, of course, bounced off the other priorities and case load of the particular field office. But again, what of the cases where there are no “hits” and the record checks come back “clean?” The answer: that is essentially the extent of the “background investigation” combined with the in-person interview the applicant will have with the Adjudicator when called into the office.

Once upon a time, until about the mid-1980s or so when the INS began doing “remote adjudications,” real background investigations against naturalization applicants were fairly common. INS Examiners in District Offices routinely conducted extensive face-to-face interviews and document reviews of naturalization applicant cases. While there was not the “luxury” of a plethora of Government databases at the time, the lengthy interviews and in-depth document analysis often revealed issues that aroused the suspicion of the Examiners. The Examiner would then refer the case to the INS Investigations Division for a naturalization background investigation.

In many INS District Offices, as in many FBI Field Offices at the time, such cases were assigned to relative new agents...the rookie agents frequently caught the BI squad and/or cases. I recall it fondly. The agents often viewed doing these cases as something routine and even boring. But in reality they sometimes produced interesting and meaningful results because agents spent a lot of time interviewing a lot of people, sometimes nasty people in nasty places, who knew the applicant and even a fair amount of time watching the applicant during surveillance. An Examiner’s hunch from an interview that a naturalization applicant, for instance, had problems telling the truth combined with keeping his temper under control revealed from the background investigation the applicant was both a drug abuser and wife beater...and therefore not a person of requisite “good moral character” and he was rightly denied citizenship. Another naturalization background investigation actually identified previously unknown espionage activities, the FBI was drawn in and took over the case and notably bigger and better things resulted.

This type of thorough field investigation of naturalization applicants essentially ended, however, when INS began the remote adjudication process in the mid-1980s, relying almost exclusively on paper adjudication and limited interview processing at the local District Office level. That, combined with an explosion in the numbers of naturalization applicants from the late 1980s onward, thanks in no small part to the disastrous chain-migration effects of the 1986 amnesty, a refocusing of very limited INS investigative resources on criminally-involved aliens, and the rest is fairly pathetic history in this regard.

Can the naturalization process be improved with more thorough background investigation of applicants? Of course. That would take substantial change in policy and process and substantial increase in resources. Neither of which the US Government is likely to undertake anytime soon.

If Fawaz Damra had been subjected to a full field background investigation in 1994 when he originally submitted his naturalization petition, it is entirely likely INS Special Agents would have discovered his links to the PIJ and other radical Islamists at that time and called in the FBI for further investigative efforts. How many hundreds, probably thousands, of Damra-like cases have managed to slip through our porous naturalization process over the past many years?

TrackBack