Obama Admin. Promises Broader Security Checks to Reduce Visa Overstays

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/new...isa-overstays/

The Obama administration – under attack by immigration advocates for having a record number of deportations under its watch – is cracking down on immigrants in the U.S. who have overstayed the terms of their visas by using a system that automatically checks multiple national security, immigration and law enforcement databases at the same time, a senior Homeland Security Department official said.

The announcement comes after the administration declared the most sweeping change to the way the United States deports immigrants in August by committing to suspend deportations while it reviewed each case and proceeded with those it considered high priority.

The common practice had been to make manual checks of individual databases. The new system has already identified dozens of investigative leads, said John Cohen, deputy counterterrorism coordinator at the Homeland Security Department.

The immediate focus is on identifying people who have overstayed their visas and who pose a potential threat to national security or public safety, Cohen said.

Some of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were in the U.S. in violation of their visas, in some cases because they did not attend a school they said they would on their application for a student visa, or their visas had expired.

The 9/11 Commission saw the visa system as a major vulnerability and recommended completing a biometric system that would log immigrants out as they left the U.S. This program, however, was never fully implemented. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has said the exit system called for by the commission is expensive, and the government has put other policies in place since 2001 to address the same issue for a lot less money.

Automating these checks is the latest of those policies. Until now, if an investigator wanted to vet a visa applicant, it would require manual checks of many databases. This policy left room for mistakes, such as someone entering the wrong spelling of an immigrant's name, which might not turn up critical national security information.

It took years for the government to effectively connect the various terror watch lists held by different government agencies after 9/11 exposed major holes in national security caused by keeping all of these lists separate. Now that those systems are interconnected and have greater search capabilities, DHS is taking it a step further to do immigration checks which will automatically scan all variants of immigration status — be it refugee or asylum — while at the same time check other criminal and national security databases and run searches on variations of names.

"The concept of interconnecting these systems isn't really an earth-shattering idea," Cohen said. But the systems that immigration data will be run against have finally reached a point where they can handle a broad check, he said.

The department is also regularly checking the systems for people whose visas haven't expired — in some cases, as often as daily or weekly, Cohen said.

Such a review process addresses the reality that information about a person's potential terrorism ties might not be clear to the intelligence community until after a visa has been issued. It would have probably flagged the Nigerian man believed to be behind the attempt on Christmas Day 2009 to blow up an airliner over Detroit, Cohen said.

Until recently, there was a backlog of 1.6 million people who had overstayed their visas in the U.S. Cohen said the department put this information through the automated checks and determined 800,000 of those people had either changed their visa status or had already left the U.S.

Of the remaining 839,000, Cohen said the department vetted everyone for potential national security and public safety concerns. With the help of the National Counterterrorism Center, the department determined there were about 2,000 people in the U.S. who warranted investigation. In some cases, those people were already under investigation or had left the country, leaving several dozen leads for ICE agents to pursue

for all you over stays either get married or something quick because they are coming after you .

I think as long as you aren't from the middle east, you are good to go

If they kick me out of the country here is what i am doing: I have four credit cards...i am maxing all of them out....trust me...i have good credit lol.... and when i get back home i am changing my name, passport and all. to hell with 10 year ban...IF I GO DOWN I AM TAKING SOMEONE WITH ME lol

time to get a fucken LAWYER! =D

Wait so if the catch us will we get the same treatment as the Memo said? meaning we get work permit etc...? If so, I will be waiting for them to knock on my door.

best advice... get a LAWYER!

Umm...yeah. Unless you are a threat to national security, then I highly doubt you are a priority.

BTW. MAY I ASK HOW DO YOU HAVE A GOOD CREDIT WITHOUT A SS NUMBER. JUST CURIOUS.

Noooo. Right now, you can ask for an EAD only if you are given an order of supervision (you have a final order of deportation from the courts), so that the governement knows where you are and what you are up to and you aren't considered a "fugitive"; or based on the memo, if your case is administratively closed, the case is only suspended from immigration proceedings so that it doesn't advance up in the judicial system. Administrative closure pretty much saves your access to future judicial review to circuit courts, etc. but the government hasn't closed any cases yet based on the guidelines yet, so people do not know the specific criteria they will use to close cases.

If you have a final order, in theory, you have exhausted all of your appeals and final judgment has been rendered in your case, so the whole "prosecutorial discretion" and EAD access is to provide relief to those have fought their cases in order to remain in this country and who meet the guidelines for low-priority. Imagine you received a final order of removal just a month before the guidelines were published, are now considered a "fugitive", but you have a lot of the equities listed in the memo -A request for deferred action is your only chance now to remain in the country, and I guess the EAD is to ameliorate the fact that you and the government already spent time and resources fighting the case.

People whose cases are terminated will have nothing to do with immigration courts, so they will pretty much be left alone as if they had never been in immigration proceedings. No EAD is available to them, because there isn't an affirmative process for deferred action for individuals who aren't in immigration proceedings.