Illegal immigrants who overstay visas hardly ever caught, feds admit

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Illegal immigrants who overstay visas hardly ever caught, feds admit
 
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jun/14/illegal-immigrants-who-overstay-visas-almost-never/
 
By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Immigration agents catch an abysmally small percentage of the illegal immigrants who arrived on visas but overstayed their welcome, authorities admitted to Congress Tuesday, describing a loophole that those around the globe are increasingly using to gain a foothold in the U.S.

At least 480,000 people overstayed their visas last year, adding to a backlog that’s reached some 5 million total, members of Congress said. But immigration agents launched investigations into just 10,000 of them, or about 0.2 percent, and arrested fewer than 2,000, less than 0.04 percent, saying the others don’t rise to the level of being priority targets.

“We utilize our prioritization scheme along with the resources that we have,” Craig Healy, assistant director for national security investigations at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said as he struggled to defend the administration’s meager efforts.

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He blamed a shortage of funding and a tricky environment, where authorities only have limited information, and it takes them months to decide if someone really did overstay their visa and if they are deemed serious enough offenders to make an effort to go after.

Members of Congress were stunned, saying more needs to be done to go after overstays.

Rep. Lamar Smith, Texas Republican, said the Obama administration has increasingly lost sight of the problem, deporting some 12,500 overstays in 2009, but just 6,800 in 2012 and only 2,500 last year — or less than one out of every 2,000.

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Estimate: Two-Thirds of New Illegal Aliens in 2015 Were Visa Overstays

David McNew/Getty Images

by CAROLINE MAY 14 Jun 2016 10


Visa overstays outpaced successful illegal border entries last year, according to a new estimate from the House Homeland Security Committee’s Border and Maritime Security Subcommittee.

According to Subcommittee Chairwomen Martha McSally (R-AZ), the subcommittee estimates that in fiscal year 2015, 68 percent of new illegal immigrants in the U.S. had unlawfully overstayed their visas.

“I’m concerned there are unidentified national security and public safety risks in a population that large, which has historically been the primary means for terrorist entry to the United States,” McSally said Tuesday at a subcommittee hearing examining the national security risks posed by illegal immigrants who overstay their visas.



As McSally detailed, terrorists — including at least four of the 9/11 hijackers — have repeatedly exploited the nation’s visa system by legally entering the U.S. and simply never returning home.

“Since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing terrorists abused the hospitality of the American people to conduct attacks here at home,” she said, noting that the 9/11 Commission dubbed travel documents “as important as weapons” for terrorists.

Congress has mandated that the federal government implement a system to track the entry and exit of foreign national in the U.S. for nearly two decades and imposed an additional requirement that such a system be biometric for over a decade. While there is a system to track entries the federal government has yet to implement the exit portion.

The hearing comes on the heels of the Orlando nightclub shooting, in which a radical Islamic terrorist murdered dozens of people in a terrorist attack considered the worst on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001. The shooter in this case was not a visa overstay but the son of an Afghan immigrants born in New York.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...isa-overstays/