The US Justice Department announced anti-terrorism changes Wednesday to require roughly 100,000 new visitors each year to provide fingerprints, photographs and details about their plans in the United States.
The government said it would keep secret most its new criteria for identifying risky immigrants.
The new rules, expected to take effect this fall, also will affect fewer than 100,000 foreigners already in the United States. Those foreigners will be instructed to report to the Immigration and Naturalization Service for registration, fingerprints and photographs and to visit immigration offices every 12 months until they leave.
Attorney General John Ashcroft declined to disclose the criteria the government will use to identify which of the 35 million foreign visitors who enter each year might be deemed threatening, except to say nearly all visitors from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Syria - except some diplomats - will face the new scrutiny.
Visitors from other countries, especially Muslim and Middle Eastern nations, could be identified as potential threats depending on other factors, such as age or gender and whether they remain in the United States longer than 30 days. Some visitors, but not all, will be told they were deemed potential threats before traveling to the United States, senior Justice officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"No country is totally exempt," Ashcroft said.
The new rules, called the "National Security Entry-Exit Registration System," will compare visitors' fingerprints with those of suspected terrorists. Ashcroft and others at the Justice Department said the collection of terrorist fingerprints was "sizable" ¡ª largely due to efforts by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. But they declined to say how many fingerprints it contained.
"We will be able to stop terrorists from entering the country," Ashcroft said. "Fingerprints don't lie."
The new rules will be open for public comment until the fall before the Justice Department formally enacts them.
Congress may weigh in on this latest immigration crackdown by the Bush administration. While some top lawmakers expressed support for the plan, others complained of possible racial and ethnic profiling.
"It is as though the equal protection clause had no meaning or context whatsoever to the authors of this Orwellian proposal," said Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. "We have long fought repressive and totalitarian regimes that sought to register their people, ban them from public places and eventually incarcerate them based solely on their race or religion."
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said the changes "will give U.S. government officials unfettered discretion to use secret criteria to decide who should be registered in a database we usually reserve for terrorists and criminals." The rules "will further stigmatize innocent Arab and Muslim visitors ... who have committed no crimes and pose no danger to us," he said.
Congress already mandated an entry-exit registration system for foreigners, and the new system is designed to focus the first efforts on those who fall into categories of elevated national security concern, Justice Department spokeswoman Barbara Comstock said.
The House Judiciary Committee chairman, Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., called the rules "a reasonable first step in regaining control over illegal immigration in the United States, which is currently out of control." But he also pledged his committee will conduct "all necessary oversight" to prevent abuses by the Justice Department.
One senior Justice official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said foreign visitors will not be asked about their religious or political affiliations.
Rep. George W. Gekas, R-Pa., a member of the immigration subcommittee, expressing support for the plan, said, "It is a sad fact that only cursory information is gathered on most aliens entering at our borders. It is also a fact that the INS cannot account for all the aliens that are currently in the United States."
The plan asks state and local police to arrest foreign visitors who fail to report to immigration officials. To help find them, the Justice Department will provide the visitors' names and fingerprints. However, Ashcroft promised to make no more requests of those departments to enforce federal immigration laws. Police departments and immigration rights groups have criticized recent proposals to involve police in such matters.
"Are we going to put everyone from Oklahoma into this database because of Timothy McVeigh?" said Texas Democratic Rep. Silvestre Reyes, a former Border Patrol chief. Reyes is a member of the House intelligence committee holding hearings probing CIA and FBI handling of advance information on the Sept. 11 hijackers. "You could clog up the database. With so much superfluous information on people coming for legitimate reasons, the people we are targeting can get lost in those numbers of records."
Ashcroft said the 19 hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks blended easily into American society while avoiding regular contacts with authorities, demonstrating flaws in the immigration system. He declined to say whether he believed the new system would have detected the plans of any of the 19 hijackers.
The Justice Department did not specify how much the new system will cost, but Ashcroft said the proposed INS budget should cover it.
(China Daily June 6, 2002)
