Americans rightly fear that terrorists, foreign intelligence agents and violent criminals could enter the United States through its porous “back door” border with Mexico, but that very real threat is eclipsed by the 1 million foreigners who legally walk right through our “front door” every day. Less than one-tenth of 1 percent of those seeking it are refused entry at the nation’s 317 ports of entry, even though federal officials have little or no idea who most of them really are.
And of the 7.5 million foreigners already here who have filed applications for permanent residency with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (formerly the INS), at least 20 percent are processed by federal employees with no access to terrorist databases or training in national security. This is according to Michael Maxwell, former director of Security at CIS and a modern Paul Revere who has been frantically trying to warn Congress for almost a year that our legal immigration system makes the U.S. vulnerable to an internal terrorist attack “worse than 9/11.”
In fact, Maxwell is the only one so far to say publicly that the U.S. needs to go back and recheck the backgrounds of 6 million-plus immigrants who have entered the U.S. legally since 2000 to make sure they pose no grave risks to national security. The number of foreigners whose backgrounds have not been subjected to any independent verification whatsoever is conservatively estimated in the hundreds of thousands, including holders of more than a thousand green cards approved by a CIS employee in Guam “by mistake” — including some North Koreans.
Of nearly 41,000 cases that triggered hits on various federal databases, 11,997 were considered “public safety” concerns. As of last fall, 1,350 known national security risks were still supposedly being investigated at Department of Homeland Security headquarters. DHS officials refuse to talk about the status of those investigations except in the most vague terms. Whether federal authorities can find the individuals in question is another story.
There is more to this grim picture. “400,000 [aliens] ordered deported by an immigration judge have disappeared into the interior of the country,” Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., warned his colleagues on the Senate floor May 24. Add a minimum of 600,000 people who were legally admitted to the U.S. by CIS adjudicators without following DHS’s own security protocols and you have a million people here — right now — who are either known or potential security risks.
Contrast that number with official estimates that the U.S. military faces between 13,000 and 17,000 insurgents in Iraq and one could start to wonder whether the legal immigration system is our nation’s biggest security risk. In his July 27 testimony before the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Maxwell called his former agency “a viper’s nest of career federal employees willing to cover up faults in the system to advance their careers and to obstruct ranking political appointees” — who themselves were either part of the problem or helped cover it up.
The DHS inspector general’s office admits that an army of some 45,000 high-risk aliens from countries that are known to sponsor terrorism have already been admitted to the U.S. since 2001 because of the department’s continuing inability to perform comprehensive background checks. But almost a year after Maxwell first brought this most alarming situation to the attention of Congress, virtually nothing has been done to correct it.
