Thread: No back ground checks on over 5000 Religious Visa`s

Hole in Customs oversight
Lapse seen in checks on sponsors of foreign workers
Sara A. Carter, Staff Writer
Article Launched:12/08/2006 12:45:33 AM PST

http://www.sbsun.com/ci_4801722

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Thousands of people who sought to sponsor religious workers for entry into the U.S. were approved to do so since 2001 without receiving proper background checks, according to a U.S. Customs and Immigration Service memo obtained by The Sun's sister newspaper, the Ontario-based Inland Valley Daily Bulletin.
Those oversights could pose a significant risk as a U.S. citizen with ties to terrorism could sponsor a person with similar beliefs to come to the United States without the sponsor being detected, according to national security experts.

Because religious visa petitioners were not required to provide their dates of birth on their applications, their national security background checks were ineffective, wrote Michael Aytes, USCIS associate director of domestic operations, and Janis Sposato, USCIS associate director of national security and records verification, in the memo.

More than 5,000 people have applied to sponsor foreign applicants, usually religious workers, into the United States since 2001.

"We learned that these (background) checks were not effective without the date of birth of the signatory," Aytes and Sposato stated in the Sept. 18 memo. "Unfortunately, this information is not captured


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on the petition."
Adding to the problem was the discovery this year of fraud by foreign religious worker applicants. Up until last month, immigration benefits were granted to religious workers within a 15-day period if the applicant was sponsored by a religious leader. On Nov. 28, USCIS suspended the 15-day time frame, known as premium processing, after learning of the fraud.

Nearly 33 percent of all immigrants who filed religious worker applications filed them fraudulently, according to USCIS documents.

Processing religious applications will now take six months, said Christopher Bentley, USCIS spokesman.

"The whole idea of creating the (Fraud Detection and National Security Office) is for us to look at programs like the religious worker visa," Bentley said. "Now we are taking corrective action."

But according to documents obtained by the newspaper, religious petitioner applications remain unchanged, with no area on them for the applicant's birth date.

Michael Cutler, a former senior special agent with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the predecessor to USCIS, said loopholes and failures in the immigration system are exploited by terrorists.

Cutler, who also testified at the 9/11 Commission hearings, said discovery of such failures five years after the 2001 terrorist attacks flies in the face of the commission's recommendations.

"The visa process is so flawed," Cutler said. "All we're doing is chasing the symptom, not the disease. The government has provided us with an illusion of enforcement, and the illusion fails to work."

USCIS Fraud Detection employees, according to the memo, will need to interview all sponsors of religious applicants individually to collect the appropriate information. If the sponsor refuses to give the information to the fraud-unit employee, the background check will run as it has in the past - making it ineffective, Cutler noted.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have for several years investigated religious petitioners believed to be linked to terrorist organizations:

Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, the Egyptian cleric who plotted the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, came to the U.S. on a religious visa.

In February, an imam (Muslim religious leader) in Seattle who was facing deportation for a fraudulent religious visa was investigated by the FBI on charges he diverted funds from his mosque to terrorist organizations.

In October, an imam in Atlanta pleaded guilty to channeling funds to Hamas, which since 1997 has been listed by the U.S. as a terrorist organization. From 1997 to 2001, the imam channeled those funds through the Holy Land Foundation in Dallas. In 2001, the foundation was shut down and its assets frozen by U.S. authorities for giving more than $12 million to Hamas since 1989.

MK, you are so right about this. I am sick of all of these loopholes.

The terrorists that want to commit the next 9 - 11 may already be in the country and we have no way to track them.

The Israeli-Palestian problem will seem simple beside
our future -- on one side the Aztlanters & on the other
the fundamentalist 7th Century types.