Tourists from 38 EU Countries - NO VISA REQUIRED
McCaul: We Need to Fix Tourist Visa Security Gap
By Melanie Hunter | December 7, 2015 | 11:58 AM EST
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) (AP Photo)
(CNSNews.com) – Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, told “Fox News Sunday” that Tuesday Congress will vote on a bill to tighten restrictions on the visa waiver program, pointing out that the Paris attackers had French or European passports and would not have had to get a visa before coming to the U.S.
“As you know on the floor on Tuesday, we'll be voting on a visa waiver program bill that will tighten up the restrictions so that people that have, basically have those visa waiver countries -- for instance, the French attackers have a French passport wouldn't have to get a visa to come into the United States,” said McCaul.
Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook killed 14 people and injured more than a dozen others in a shooting at a social services facility in San Bernardino, Calif., on Dec. 2. Authorities said Malik moved to the U.S. from Pakistan in 2014 on a K1 or “fiancée visa,” and then married Farook.
McCaul said there needs to be more scrutiny of the national security investigation to get the fiancée visa.
As Fox News host Chris Wallace explained, in 38 European countries, there’s a visa waiver where people from those countries can come to the U.S. as tourists, without any screening at all.
“Can I just quickly ask you about that, because I think a lot of you may not know, for all the talk about the refugees, for all the talk about the fiancée visa. In 38 countries, a lot of them in Europe, there's a visa waiver. They can come into this country, a lot of them come as tourists, hundreds of thousands of them come without any screening at all. Does that have to stop?” Wallace asked.
“Well, it does, and that's what our bill fixes on Tuesday, 5,000 of these foreign fighters that have gone to Syria and Iraq have Western passports, and therefore, do not have to obtain a visa before they come into the United States,” said McCaul. “Now, Chris, this is a huge security gap.
“It needs to be addressed and fixed, and the Congress understands that, as does the White House, and we intend to do that, but if you think again about the majority of the Paris attackers have French or other European passports, they wouldn't have had to go get a visa before coming to the United States,” he said.
“That's a threat to the homeland. It's a threat to Europe, obviously, but the bigger threat to the homeland is the ease of travel visa waiver to get into the United States,” he added.
“Another area, you were one of the majority in Congress who voted to end the NSA's bulk collection of phone data, the fact that my phone number called your phone number and spoke for X number of minutes, and that program ran out last Sunday, a week ago,” said Wallace.
“As a result of that, that means that authorities are going to have access to only the last two years of Farook's phone records, but now, the previous three years because they have five years in their file, the previous three years, those years in their files are now off limits. Was it a mistake to end the NSA phone data collection program?” Wallace asked.
As a former federal prosecutor, McCaul said he did FISA warrants where they would “go to phone companies to get that information rather than have all that information warehoused under the federal government, and so, I think it's coming back to a system that worked in the past.
“It's just going to the private sector to get that information and not taking all that data and warehousing it under the NSA,” he said. “I’m sure there will be debates in the Congress further about this. I feel confident about our ability to track terrorists through court orders and getting into these phone records.”
What McCaul said he was most worried about was “this dark space phenomenon of communications between terrorists from Raqqa into the United States, or Raqqa to Paris or Belgium.”
He said “even with a court order, we can't see the encrypted communications they are using, and if you can't see what the terrorists are saying, you can't stop it, and that's one of the biggest challenges before the FBI today.”
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