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New immigration unit has caught 1,400 lawbreakers
By LISA HOFFMAN
Scripps Howard News Service
October 27, 2005

- Wanted in Germany for a 1997 murder, a truck driver from the Republic of Georgia in Europe had been living under a false name in Canada. He routinely crossed the border into the United States with ease.

Until May, no one was the wiser. But a match of his fingerprints tipped U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents that he was a wanted man. In no time, he was arrested and later extradited to Germany to stand trial.

In March, an accused sexual offender from Albania, who was wanted by Dallas police for failing to register his presence there, was snared by a biometric "lookout" database as he tried to leave the United States. The man was removed from the Lufthansa airliner he had boarded, turned over to local authorities and later deported.

Last month, an international fugitive from charges that he created a bogus religious organization in Colombia and bilked victims of hundreds of thousands of dollars, was tracked down in his Coral Gables, Fla., residence and taken into custody.

And in the month leading to the 2004 presidential election - which officials said was a target for disruption by terrorists - a series of 1,300 domestic field investigations of people believed to pose a potential national security risk resulted in the arrests of 270 on immigration violations.

In all of these arrests, it was the investigative work of the immigration and customs bureau's Compliance Enforcement Unit that has corralled more than 1,440 absconders and other lawbreakers since it was created in June 2003.

Two database tools enabled those catches, as well as the denial of nearly 7,000 visas for would-be entrants, according to Department of Homeland Security acting Assistant Secretary John Clark. Neither existed before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

One is the 17-month-old US-VISIT program, which collects fingerprints and other biographic information from visitors on their arrival in, and departure from, the United States. Until this system was created in January 2004, it was a relative snap for miscreants to enter and leave the United States using fraudulent documents and aliases. Not so with fingerprints.

"In the past, criminals and others who were the subject of lookouts needed only a new name to slip across our borders," Department of Homeland Assistant Secretary Michael Garcia, who oversees the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, told a House committee earlier this year.

The other tool is the Student Exchange Visitor Information System, an Internet-based program deployed in 2003 that helps the bureau keep track of thousands of foreign students and exchange visitors, many of whom in the past never went home once their studies were over.

Using data gleaned from the student and visitor databases, CEU agents compare it to information from Interpol on criminals and fugitives, the U.S. State Department's list of lost and stolen passports, the FBI's known or wanted terrorist files, and other sources.

For international students, information is assembled on their location from the time they are accepted at an American school until the end of their courses and the expiration of their visas.

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, officials learned that four of the 19 hijackers were foreign students who had violated the terms of their visas. One of the culprits convicted of the World Trade Center Bombing in 1993 was also in the United States on a student visa, even though he never attended classes.

Before the attacks, the system for monitoring consisted of an archaic, paper-based process that was overwhelmed by keeping track of a many as 1 million international students at 70,000 U.S. schools.

"Prior to 9/11, there was not an effective system in the United States to accurately monitor the immigration status of foreign students and other visitors to this country - with disastrous consequences," Clark said. "There are now systems in place to address this vulnerability and we are doing so aggressively."