WASHINGTON, May 3 (UPI) -- The U.S. government needs to do more to ensure that immigration officials have the information they need to weed out potential terrorists trying to get into the country, say the nation's top terror hunters.
The U.S. National Counter-Terrorism Center Tuesday issued the unclassified version of its National Strategy to Combat Terrorist Travel. The strategy, mandated by the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, was first published in classified form in February.
The unclassified version outlines and assesses key inter-agency policy initiatives designed to stop suspected terrorists getting into the United States, and to make it harder for them to travel internationally.
It recommends increased information sharing about potential or suspected terrorists within the government -- and with foreign allies.
Under the heading, "Continuing Challenges and Proposed Actions," the report says the U.S. government must try harder on sharing classified information about terrorist suspects within and between federal agencies.
"Building on current efforts," the report recommends, the government "should ... grant the appropriate security clearances to consular, Customs and Border Protection, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers, and establish the required technical infrastructure to support the sharing of classified information on travelers with potential ties to terrorism."
U.S. Customs and Border Protection employs the inspectors who check foreigners' papers at U.S. borders, ports and airports; and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services' staff grant benefits -- like the right to work or to settle -- to foreigners already in the country.
In recent months, lawmakers have peppered officials from the Department of Homeland Security, which houses both agencies, with increasingly urgent questions about whether officials making key decisions about which aliens to admit to the country or to grant immigration benefits have enough access to classified terror watch-list information.
The symbol of justice is blindfolded, recalled Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., at a House hearing last month. "But imagine 40 percent of your (immigration) adjudicators actually wearing a blindfold instead of looking ... to determine whether people are listed in the criminal and national-security information data-base."
U.S Citizenship and Immigration Services Spokesman William Strassberger told United Press International that he could not respond directly to the report, which he said he had not had a chance to review.
But he said the agency checked "100 percent" of applications against the U.S. government's terrorist watch-list.
"There is always room for improvement and we are always working to improve the access our people have to the information they need," he said.
The question has become more urgent because the agency would be responsible for verifying the identities of undocumented workers under any plan to regularize their status. Several of the immigration reform proposals currently being considered in the Senate contain such plans.
The National Counter-Terrorism Center also makes a series of recommendations aimed at boosting U.S. co-operation with foreign allies in the arena of terrorist travel.
It says the U.S. government should work with its Canadian counterparts to "examine the feasibility of developing and implementing" a common watch-list screening procedure and system for everyone crossing the border between the two countries in either direction.
It urges continued work with foreign allies "to develop identity verification systems aimed at detecting and intercepting high-risk travelers," like the State Department's Terrorism Interdiction Program, which provides secure software to foreign border police to enable them to check for travelers who might be terror suspects.
According to the department, the Terrorism Interdiction Program "provides participant countries with the ability to collect, compare and analyze traveler data to assist the country in securing its borders and, if necessary, detain individuals of interest."
The program is or has been operating in nearly a dozen countries, according to various documents on the department's Web site: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh in South Asia; as well as Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Uganda in east Africa; and Cambodia and the Philippines.
At the core of TIP is a software program called PISCES, "tailored to each country's specific needs," according to the State Department, which officials can use "to quickly retrieve information on persons who may be trying to hastily depart the country after a terrorist incident."
