Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolfsong
..... What happened here? The kid just said to the TSA agent......"I have no visa I am student......here is bottle of vodka for politsiya .....have good day....." and strolled on through?
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The student visa for Azamat Tazhayakov had been terminated when he arrived in New York on Jan. 20. But the border agent in the airport did not have access to the information in the Homeland Security Department's Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, called SEVIS.
Tazhayakov was a friend and classmate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Tazhayakov left the U.S. in December and returned Jan. 20. But in early January, his student-visa status was terminated because he was academically dismissed from the university.
A spokesman for the department, Peter Boogaard, said earlier this week that the government was working to fix the problem, which allowed Tazhayakov to be admitted into the country when he returned to the U.S.
Under existing procedures, border agents could verify a student's status in SEVIS only when the person was referred to a second officer for additional inspection or questioning. Tazhayakov was not sent to a second officer when he arrived, because, Boogaard said, there was no information to indicate Tazhayakov was a national security threat. Under the new procedures, all border agents were expected to be able to access SEVIS by next week.
The government for years has recognized as a problem the inability of border agents at primary inspection stations to directly review student-visa information. The Homeland Security Department was working before the bombings to resolve the problem, but the new memo outlined interim procedures until the situation was corrected.
Under the new procedures, border agents will verify a student's visa status before the person arrives in the U.S. using information provided in flight manifests. If that information is unavailable, border agents will check the visa status manually with the agency's national targeting data center.
Read more:
http://www.sfgate.com/news/politics/...#ixzz2SKNjABIy
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What is interesting is how Homeland Security knew this was an issue for years and was "working on a solution". Amazing how they managed to find a "solution" so quickly, after the fact, only when the issue found its way to the light of day and was connected to a terrorist incident.
The illusion of safety? An immigration issue? A convenient excuse to link immigration to terrorism? An example of how the rhetoric we are fed doesn't fit the reality?