Report Criticizes Federal Pursuit of Visa Violators as Too Lax

WASHINGTON - The government has to do a better job of tracking down visitors to the United States who violate their visas, including faster identification of those who ignore the law, the Department of Homeland Security says.

The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement made only 671 apprehensions in 2004 despite receiving 301,046 leads of possible violations, the department's inspector general said Friday in a report. The leads, most of which come from national computer databases that track foreign students and other visitors, often lack sufficient information, the report said.

One of the broadest data sources, for example - the US-VISIT program, which fingerprints and photographs foreigners as they enter the United States - tracks departures only through some ports. So the US-VISIT data does not distinguish between people who are overstaying visas and those who have left through a port that did not document their departure, the report said.

A study this year by a private group that favors stricter immigration policies found that at least 94 foreign-born visitors accused of terror activity between 1993 and 2004 exploited federal immigration laws to enter or remain in the United States.

Every week in 2004, US-VISIT gave the bureau an average of 2,405 cases of possible visa violations, including potential overstays, Friday's report said.

The bureau said it will continue to work with the data collecting programs like US-VISIT to get better information. The bureau also said adequate US-VISIT data will not be possible until departure information is collected at all exit points.

After reviewing a sample of cases, the inspector general said it took the bureau an average of 47 days to close a file on a possible visa violator.

In cases of possible student visa violation, for instance when a foreign student may have stopped going to classes or paying tuition, the bureau required an average 78 days to process a lead, the inspector general said, based on a sample.

The bureau responded that its enforcement unit follows leads it considers the most important based on the level of the threat. Spokesman Dean Boyd said the unit was created to deal with high-risk visa violators and "was never intended to be the sole mechanism to address all visa violators."

The compliance and enforcement unit of the bureau was created in June of 2003 and has made 1,440 arrests of high risk-visa violators nationwide, the bureau said Friday.

From 33 percent to 50 percent of all illegal aliens in the United States entered the country legally on visas that they eventually violated by overstaying. The report estimated that more than 3.6 million illegal immigrants currently in the country may have overstayed visas and are living in the United States illegally.