DO WE HAVE A PRO-TERRORIST IMMIGRATION SERVICE?

Have you ever heard of a religious visa petitioner?  Any recognized religious organization may file a R-1 visa request for a foreign national to come to the US and work for them.

Since September 11, 2001, more than 5,000 petitioners have applied to sponsor foreign religious workers.  The majority of them are Moslems.  The majority were granted visas and immigration benefits without proper background checks.

Is the US Citizenship and Immigration Service pro-terrorist, trying to get Moslem terrorists into our country?  No – but it might as well be.

From my sources inside the USCIS, I have obtained an internal memo quoting Michael Aytes, Associate Director, Domestic Operations, and Janis Sposato, Associate Director, National Security and Records Verification Directorate, that national security background checks on religious sponsors were ineffective because petitioners were not required to provide their date of birth on the application.

This failure now forces USCIS employees with the Fraud Detection and National Security Office make site visits to the homes of thousands of  religious petitioners – those who've sponsored religious workers – in an effort to gather their birth information missing on their application.

"Current policy instructs Service Center, District Office, or Fraud Detection Unit (FDU) personnel to perform a (national security check) on the signatory of the petition at the front end of the petition process…we learned that these checks were not effective without the date of birth of the signatory," Aytes and Sposato stated in the memo, dated September 18, 2006. "Unfortunately, this information is not captured on the petition."  

Needless to say, the failure to conduct adequate background checks poses a significant risk to the United States as Moslem terrorists and other criminals could use the system to go undetected.            

Concurrently adding to the problem was the discovery this year of massive fraud among foreign religious worker applicants.  

Up until last month, religious benefits – I-360 or I-129 visas – were granted to religious workers within a 15 day time frame if the applicant was sponsored by a religious leader.  On November 28, USCIS suspended the 15 day time frame, known as premium processing, after pinpointing the failures.          

Nearly 33 percent of all persons who were sponsored under I-360 religious worker applications filed fraudulently, according to USCIS documents.          

Processing religious applications will now require a six month background check, according to Christopher Bentley, spokesman for USCIS.             

"The whole idea of creating our Fraud Detection and National Security Office is for us to look at programs like the religious worker visa," Bentley said. "We've completed a Benefit Fraud Assessment on the religious visa applications and now we are taking corrective action. Any vulnerability we will take corrective action and ensure to close those gaps," he assured me.     

But – according to applications I have obtained, current religious visa applications show that USCIS has made no changes to resolve the failure.          

The I-129 visa application still does not have an area for the applicant's birth date, therefore making any background check useless.          

Michael Cutler, former Senior Special Agent with Immigration and Naturalization Service, the predecessor to USCIS, explained to me how loopholes and failures in the system are exploited by terrorists.  

Cutler, who also testified before the 9-11 Commission hearings, said that the discovery of these failures five years after the 2001 terrorist attacks is frightening.          

"We're having this debate about the virtual wall on the Mexican border and meanwhile 40 percent of the illegal aliens in the U.S. did not run across the border but came in through our immigration system," Cutler said.  

"The government has provided us with an illusion of enforcement and the illusion fails to work. We're chasing the symptom not the disease."          

Here's how illusory our immigration enforcement is:  Until the issuance of the Sept. 18 internal memo sent nationwide to USCIS directors and officials with the Fraud Detection Units, its employees and upper management were totally unaware of their failure to gather the complete information on the foreign applicants. 

According to the Aytes and Sposato memo, employees with the Fraud Detection office will now need to personally locate and interview all sponsors of religious applicants to collect the missing information.  

Which means that thousands of foreign  Moslem "religious workers" now in the US have had no background check on them at all.          

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have been conducting nationwide investigations into religious visa fraud. Some of those arrests have had direct connections to terrorist organizations.  Here are three recent examples.

*February, 2006:  A Moslem Imam in Seattle, Washington faced deportation for a fraudulent religious visa.  The FBI uncovered evidence that he diverted funds from his mosque to Islamic terrorist organizations.

*October, 2006:  An Imam in Atlanta, Georgia, pleaded guilty to channeling funds to Hamas, noted as a terrorist organization since 1997 by the United States. He channeled those funds from 1997 to 2001 through the Holy Land Foundation, in Dallas, Texas. The foundation was shut down and its assets frozen by U.S. authorities in 2001 for giving more than $12 million in funding to Hamas since 1989.

*November, 2006:  ICE officers arrested dozens of Pakistani immigrants across the East Coast who entered under false pretenses as religious workers. The Pakistani immigrants who were supposed to be teaching religious classes were actually working as taxi drivers, factory workers and construction. 

How many thousands of other examples are out there in our midst? 

Sara Carter is a reporter for the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin in Ontario, California.