U.S. visitor tracking system in place at every port

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.

Even so, observers applauded the news that the Department of Homeland Security had finished laying the foundation for the ambitious program.

“This is a good news story,” said Clark Kent Ervin, a former DHS inspector general and director of the Homeland Security Initiative for the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. “It’s a very, very good first step.”

But there were caveats. “At airports, (US-VISIT) has made a great difference,” said Jessica M. 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, DHS 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.

“From a national security perspective, the problem isn’t so much that Mexicans and Canadians aren’t screened, but that a terrorist group or someone a lot more dangerous than a Mexican busboy will show up,” Vaughan said. “If someone from Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) figures out they can come through from Mexico with a stolen card, they could probably get through.”

Another potential flaw is that, apart from a few pilot programs, the system 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.

“You need both an exit feature as well as an entry feature,” Ervin said. “Unless you have both ends, the system still isn’t operational.”

In early December, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff offered no timetable for beefing up exit tracking.

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.

Among problems being worked out is the system’s incompatibility with the FBI fingerprint database. DHS is now revising its fingerprinting practices.