Deporting The INS

By Bill Saporito

The papers from the Immigration and Naturalization Service arrived in the morning mail at Huffman Aviation International like notices for long-overdue library books. The forms in the envelope that Huffman president Rudi Dekkers opened Monday, March 11, announced that Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi were cleared for takeoff, their M-1 student visas approved for flying lessons--six months to the day after the two terrorists steered hijacked jetliners into oblivion and mass carnage at the World Trade Center towers.

In the bizarre bureaucracy of the INS, the system had functioned precisely as it was designed to, which is why the INS is about to be torn apart. An angry President Bush ordered an investigation when he read about the incident. Furious members of Congress are pushing legislation to gut the INS, a bureaucracy that never had many friends in Washington and is now totally alienated. "We've all been dumbfounded by these revelations," fumed Congressman James Sensenbrenner Jr., who chairs the House Judiciary Committee. "This fiasco is indicative of the enormous mismanagement of the INS."

Sensenbrenner and Pennsylvania's George Gekas want to dismantle the INS and place its functions in two separate agencies overseen by the Justice Department. One would handle immigration services, and the other would be in charge of law enforcement. Another bill, which passed the House last week, would add 1,000 agents to track down unwanted aliens; close the vast loopholes in the student-visa program; allocate $150 million for border-policing technology, including biometrics that could electronically identify fingerprints; and mandate a shared-information platform with the Justice and State departments to keep potential terrorists from falling through the cracks. Even today, for instance, the INS and FBI fingerprint systems can't cross-reference. The same bill has been proposed in the Senate, but it is snarled in a procedural squabble that could delay a vote for another month. INS Commissioner James W. Ziglar tried to quell the revolt in part by joining it. Calling the visa fiasco "unacceptable," he announced a major shake-up, reassigning four senior officials. He too favors separating the agency's enforcement unit from its immigration side. But that might not be enough to placate Sensenbrenner, who wants Ziglar's scalp.

If the INS exhibits outsize incompetence, perhaps it is in proportion to its mission. More than 250 million citizens and noncitizens enter and exit the U.S. each year, many crossing the border repeatedly, and the agency is supposed to keep tabs on all nonresidents. Most foreigners go home when they're supposed to, but as many as 8 million are in the U.S. illegally.

As the hijackers knew so well, once foreigners are inside the U.S., the chances of the INS's finding them are slim. The agency's data collection is unreliable, and its computer systems are outmoded. Three of the 19 terrorists behind Sept. 11 had overstayed their visas, and they weren't alone. Right now, more than 3 million foreigners are living in the U.S. on expired visas. The INS has fewer than 2,000 agents to locate them. And those same agents have plenty of other duties--finding noncitizen criminals, investigating employers who exploit illegals, helping fight the drug war--that stretch manpower beyond the limit. "The INS does not do a good job of deporting people who should be deported," says Sensenbrenner, pointing to agency assertions that it could not account for 314,000 people ordered deported. On the inbound side, he says, there is a backlog of 5 million cases, many of them applications for legal residency.

The INS has always had a conflicted agenda, to guard the borders and at the same time to welcome immigrants. Now congressional detractors say the agency can't do anything right. "As currently structured, the INS has proved itself to be an agency utterly incapable of carrying out the diverse missions," says Georgia Congressman Bob Barr, a conservative Republican. "We are essentially asking it to do an impossible task."

Yet the system has resisted reform in part because businesses, universities, law-enforcement agencies and Congress itself have thrown up roadblocks. Industries such as meat-packing, manufacturing, tourism and restaurants, which rely heavily on foreign-born workers, have effectively lobbied Congress to keep the INS at bay. There are political and ethnic sensibilities too, since many illegals are Hispanics seeking a better life. INS personnel have been reluctant to bust house painters and hotel maids for working hard, and the Justice Department, which oversees the agency, wants the cooperation of immigrant communities in pursuing bigger crimes like drug trafficking.

Sensenbrenner complains that the INS has "delayed and delayed" implementing a foreign-student tracking system that Congress mandated in 1996. Half a million people are in the U.S. under student visas. Schools are supposed to inform the INS when foreign students arrive for classes, but the system became antiquated and useless. When the INS tried to enforce the new regulations, school administrators complained to their congressional representatives of red tape.

When Atta and Al-Shehhi showed up at Huffman Aviation on July 1, 2000, they were holding tourist visas. Huffman enrolled both, charging Al-Shehhi $20,000 and Atta, who had a private pilot's license, $18,700. Huffman regularly trained foreign students (a lucrative business for flying schools), so the two raised no suspicions. A month later, the school's student coordinator, Nicole Antini, helped Atta and Al-Shehhi file the appropriately bureaucratic form, the Certificate of Eligibility for Nonimmigrant (M-1) Student Status for Vocational Students, to change their visa status from tourist to student. These applications joined about 7.3 million other such annual filings for status changes.

The INS approved both visas about a year later--Atta's on July 17, 2001, and Al-Shehhi's on Aug. 9, 2001. They promptly received formal notices from the INS. By then, of course, both students had finished their training; Huffman had been under no legal obligation to wait for INS approval before enrolling them. No background check had been required, and even if it had been, neither Atta nor Al-Shehhi was in the FBI or CIA databases as a suspected al-Qaeda operative.

The forms Huffman received last week were merely copies of the stamped approvals for the hijackers. The school's copies arrived so late because the documents came from an outsource firm, Affiliated Computer Services Inc. of London, Ky., whose contract with the INS required it to store the forms for six months before sending them back to the school, according to the company. ACS, which gets $3 billion in government business every year, now must return INS-processed M-1 visa applications within 30 days.

The visa changes are emblematic of the groaning information gap the INS or its successor has to fill. The bipartisan bill, which passed the House and which Jon Kyl, Dianne Feinstein, Ted Kennedy and Sam Brownback are sponsoring in the Senate, requires Justice and State to issue travel documents, such as visas, that are machine readable and tamper resistant and have biometric identifiers. The two departments must install equipment and software to allow biometric comparisons of travel documents at all U.S. ports of entry. All commercial flights and vessels coming into the U.S. will be required to provide manifest information prior to arrival.

The bill eliminates the 45-minute INS time limit for clearing arriving passengers. That regulation was created because in another era everyone from Congressmen to customs agents believed that getting into the U.S. shouldn't be an ordeal. The welcome mat was already being pulled back after Sept. 11. Now it may disappear, along with the INS. --Reported by Jeanne DeQuine/Miami and Viveca Novak, Elaine Shannon and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by Jeanne DeQuine/Miami and Viveca Novak, Elaine Shannon and Douglas Waller/Washington