Suspects, Reportedly Tied to Al Qaeda in Iraq, Sought Student Visas

By Michael Cutler

"Being There" was the title of a movie starring Peter Sellers that was produced in 1979. It was based on a satirical novel. For criminals and terrorists, the theme can be described as "Being Here!" Their goal is to be able to enter the United States in order to carry out crimes and attacks within the United States in furtherance of their malevolent objectives. News articles out today from both ABC News and NBC News report on a disturbing prospect, that terrorists are intent on gaining access to the United States through the flawed student visa program.

As the 9-11 Commission noted, in order to attack our nation on September 11, 2001, the terrorists needed to first, of all, manage to enter the United States. This finding does not require brilliance, just common sense. For many years I have been making the point that the porous borders of the United States represent only one vulnerability of many. The fact is that the Visa Waiver Program and fact that students attending schools in the United States are monitored by foreign student advisors who are employed by the schools that reap the lucrative tuition fees when they admit foreign students leave the system wide open to all sorts of manipulation with gaps large enough to fly airliners through! This is further exacerbated by the simple fact that there are only about 3,000 special agents employed by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) who are required to perform a wide variety of jobs that fall under the auspices of the "Interior enforcement" mission of ICE. To name just a few of the more significant missions that these overworked agents are required to undertake:

Conduct investigations of employers of illegal aliens and implement employer sanctions, where appropriate;

Conduct investigations of fraud; both the manufacture and distribution of fraudulent identity documents and supporting documents (this includes both altered and outright counterfeit documents), as well as fraud schemes such as those who engage in marriage fraud and labor certification fraud;

Identify and apprehend criminal aliens who have been deported and subsequently reenter the United States illegally;

Identify nonimmigrant aliens who overstay their authorized period of stay in the United States; and

Assist on various task forces such as the Drug Task Force and the Counterterrorism Task Force.

When you consider all of these tasks, the number of illegal aliens present in the United States and the lack of resources, it becomes quickly evident that it is extremely easy for terrorists to play a game of "Hide and Seek" with our immigration enforcement officials, secure in the knowledge that they can hide and it is unlikely that ICE will do much seeking. They lack the resources to enforce the immigration laws from within the United States.

This lack of resources creates another problem for our nation. While most politicians decried the lack of good intelligence to help our nation prevent the attacks of September 11, 2001, many of them do not truly understand how intelligence can be gathered and then evaluated. It is certainly true that intelligence gathering needs to be conducted overseas in order to protect our nation, however, a significant amount of intelligence can be developed by cultivating informants in the United States. That process involves the apprehension of law violators and then offering them the possibility of helping them reduce their sentences or even forestall deportation if such individuals cooperate with the government in working as informants. Indeed, there is even a process by which aliens can, under very limited circumstances, be offered residency or a so-called "Green card" for themselves and their families as well as cash rewards, if they provide significant information that help to dismantle alien smuggling rings, drug smuggling rings, or terrorist organizations. The issue is that in order to carry out this vital mission, it is absolutely critical that there be an adequate number of special agents of ICE who are "out there" doing their jobs and seeking to cultivate such informants. Without adequate numbers of agents and resources, these efforts to cultivate informants and pursue the other vital missions will simply not happen.

While much has been made about the borders of the United States, especially the Mexican border, scant attention has been paid to the way that criminals and terrorists can easily enter the United States through ports of entry and then embed themselves in our country so that they can hide in plain sight among us until the day that they receive their orders to slaughter our citizens and destroy critical infrastructures. On May 11, 2006, I testified before the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on International Relations. The topic of the hearing was, "VISA OVERSTAYS: CAN WE BAR THE TERRORIST DOOR?"

The lack of agents at ICE is only surpassed by the lack of integrity of the immigration bureaucracy that will seemingly hand out immigration benefits including resident alien status and even United States citizenship to aliens even when the immigration files of those aliens are lost. The priority of USCIS has been to chase the backlogs of applications for benefits rather than to go after the rampant fraud that helps to artificially inflate the number of applications that need to be processed.

Paul Revere had it relatively easy. Legend has it that he needed only 3 candles to signal the possible ways that the British might attack our nation. "One if by land, two if by sea," summed up the possibilities. Today the candle system would probably lead to a house fire! We have porous borders, we have a flawed program to inspect cargo containers opening the potential for stowaways, we have the Visa Waiver Program, we have a flawed immigration benefits program lacking even a modicum of integrity and we have the student visa program to name just a few.

Our nation remains at risk and the administration and all too many members of Congress are refusing to effectively deal with these areas of vulnerability.

What will it take to get our "leaders" to understand that the immigration system must be truly seen as a system. For far too long the holes in the system have been allowed to grow ever larger! How many times can the President and the politicians hit the "snooze" button and fail to hear the wake-up call? How can they even discuss a guest worker amnesty program to be administered by the inept and incompetent bureaucracy at USCIS that, if implemented, would further facilitate the embedding of terrorists in our country?

Lead, follow or get out of the way!

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