Visitor tracking system in place

Published 9:00 pm Friday, December 30, 2005

Four years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has finished installing the equipment for a system to identify, photograph and fingerprint visitors arriving at every land, sea and air port in the country.

The absence of a reliable system for tracking visitors was identified as a serious national security gap as the U.S. reassessed its counterterrorism efforts in the wake of Sept. 11. The new program, called US-VISIT, is the country’s first comprehensive system to track foreigners and check their information against criminal and terrorist watch lists.

Described as the “greatest single advance in border security in three decades” by former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, it is not yet fully operational and has been dismissed by critics who charge that the program’s loopholes and its slow implementation have done little to improve national security.

“At airports, (US-VISIT) has made a great difference,” said Jessica Vaughan, a senior policy analyst with the Center for Immigration Studies. But, she said, even though it has been installed at land points, it is not being used on most people passing through.

US-VISIT first debuted in January 2004 with the installation of biometric equipment at airports and seaports. By December of that year, the program had been expanded to the 50 busiest land border crossings. On Dec. 19, Homeland Security met a year-end deadline set by Congress to equip the remaining land crossings by year’s end.

United States Visitor and Immigration Status Indicator Technology – its full name – is in place at 154 land crossings, 15 seaports and the 115 airports that handle international travel. At these checkpoints, visitors must stop to pose for a digital photo and let border agents take digital impressions of their two index fingers.

But not everyone who passes through is subject to the program. U.S. citizens, Canadians, most Mexicans, permanent legal residents and diplomats are exempt, so that of the 90 million people who passed through an airport or seaport in 2004, only 42 percent had to stop to have their data recorded.

At land crossings, where 335 million people entered the United States in 2004, that figure dropped to 1 percent, according to Anna Hinken, a spokeswoman for US-VISIT.

Another potential flaw is that, apart from a few pilot programs, the program does not yet track visitors as they leave. That shortcoming handicaps the program’s national security function as well as its role as an immigration tool, as visa overstays are estimated to account for up to half of illegal immigrants.

In early December, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff offered no timetable for beefing up exit tracking. “I have to say it’s a complicated question,” Chertoff said at a news conference. “We’ve got some pilot programs. We want to evaluate the utility and what we may want to do to retool that process.”

Some critics charge that DHS has dragged its feet on an exit program, saying the department doesn’t want to know how many visa overstay violators there are because it lacks the resources to track them down.

Defending the department, Hinken said that DHS faces the challenge of creating a tracking system where none existed before. Unlike many other European and Asian countries, the United States has not required international travelers to go through immigration checkpoints as they depart.

Since January 2004, the US-VISIT system has processed 44 million people and has snared 970 people with criminal or immigration violations. Apparently, no one was stopped for ties to terrorism.