On his first day in office, President Biden revoked the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s travel vetting infrastructure, undoing four years of arduous, and successful, work to protect the public. In his proclamation, he claimed that national security will be enhanced. Unfortunately, the facts don’t support that statement.
One of the primary responsibilities of DHS is to keep us safe by ensuring that those who wish to enter our country are properly screened and vetted. It is undisputed after all that there are evil people out there who seek to travel to the United States with ill intent.
In early 2017, former President Donald Trump and DHS first implemented travel restrictions on seven countries. Admittedly, the rollout was less than ideal. The policy was poorly communicated to the public. But let’s be clear — no “Muslim Ban” ever existed. Still, the notion did quickly gain momentum as a talking point for the establishment media as well as elected officials of a particular leaning.
Unfortunately, it was this experience four years ago, not the policy itself or even its outcomes, that likely influenced Biden’s decision to revoke what was an essential counterterrorism tool.
Since 9/11, the U.S. government has been building, and continues to refine, its vetting infrastructure that detects terrorists trying to enter the country. This capability relies upon documentation provided by prospective travelers as well as information provided by their governments.
For this reason, DHS carefully and methodically developed a complex set of quantifiable criteria by which countries were to be assessed and ranked. Those criteria included the issuance of modern, electronic passports; the ability to report the loss or theft of passports to Interpol; the ability to share information on known or suspected terrorists; and the level of risk posed by a country due to terrorist travel, crime, or illegal migration.
Every country in the world has been aware of these basic standards for years. Those that failed to meet them were identified for tailored travel restrictions in order to incentivize compliance and minimize risk. Again, countries that were deficient, such as Iran, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia, had consciously chosen not to take the necessary actions to become compliant.
Importantly, DHS’s approach was quantitatively driven, intended to minimize the risk associated with identity management or information-sharing deficiencies of a particular country. And neither religion nor geography ever had anything to do with the vetting. In fact, several countries, such as North Korea, Venezuela, Burma, and Tanzania, were subject to restrictions and are not Muslim-majority countries.
The process DHS employed was not static. Rather, it was constantly evolving. DHS systematically reviewed all countries against the established criteria on five separate occasions since 2017, and the latest review provided the most detailed picture yet of the degree of compliance.
To evaluate a country’s performance against the criteria, DHS established a consistent process in coordination with the U.S. departments of State, Justice, and Defense — as well as with the intelligence community. DHS would spend months collecting data from U.S. embassies abroad and uploading it into an assessment tool that ranked each country.
How do we know it was working? The simple answer: the facts. The process yielded major improvements in foreign government identity management and information sharing. We saw an increase in the number of countries reporting lost and stolen passports to Interpol, and more countries were sharing their travel documents and actionable intelligence.
In fact, in 2018, the Republic of Chad had its travel restrictions removed after improving its performance across all of the vetting criteria, proving that countries are both becoming safer and sharing more information with the U.S. government. And in June 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that the vetting infrastructure put in place by DHS was valid and within the constitutional authority of the president.
Trump’s and DHS’s travel restrictions were yielding significant results, making everyone safer and more secure. Our world is complex and dangerous, so now is not the time to fulfill a campaign promise by decommissioning a proven tool in our counterterrorism arsenal.
At the beginning of this administration, I was hopeful Biden would appreciate the effectiveness of the measures implemented over the past four years. Regrettably, with his revocation of commonsense travel vetting, America is now less safe. This is the real peril of political posturing.
Chad F. Wolf served as acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration.
