The U.S. government is not using polygraph tests to vet Syrian refugees for admission to the United States, a Department of Homeland Security official told Congress Wednesday.
“If your question is, ‘Are we using polygraphs?’ The answer is no,” Leon Rodriguez, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, told a House Homeland Security Committee.
Rodriguez admitted that the government isn’t using the lie detector machines during a hearing examining the vetting process for the nearly 10,000 refugees slated for entrance to the United States.
Other than answering that specific question, Rodriguez said he could not disclose the granular details of the refugee screening process in an open hearing. Some of the same administration officials had appeared before the panel Tuesday during a closed session to describe the screening process.
Members also focused on new U.S. government efforts to screen the social media accounts of Syrian and Iraqi refugee applicants, after evidence surfaced suggesting that immigration officials might have missed clues foreign fighters left in cyberspace about their intentions.
Rodriguez stressed that his agency has a vetting process for Syrian refugees, and said officials have begun to review social media activity in “those cases where there are existing flags of concern.” He said his agency would expand that scrutiny to include all of the Syrian refugee applicants.
The agency’s policy, he said, “prioritizes the area where there is the greatest risk,” but he noted that monitoring social media is just “one tool among a battery” used in conjunction with information derived elsewhere. That includes multiple interviews with family members and others in the Syrian community.
Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, who chairs the Homeland Security Committee, recommended that DHS expand the social media scrutiny to include not just all the 10,000 Syrian refugees awaiting entrance to the United States, but all the U.S. visa applicants. Homeland Security Undersecretary for Intelligence and Analysis Francis Taylor assured him that the department plans to do just that.
“At the beginning we won’t have enough capability to do this robustly,” he said, noting that translating language on social media sites requires hiring additional linguists. “But long-term, we will build a capability with government employees who are trained and able to do it.”
The social media issue has drawn attention after reports that the terrorist couple, whose December attack in San Bernardino, Calif., killed 14 people, had used Facebook and other social media sites to praise the Islamic State. One of the shooters, Tahfeen Malik, reportedly pledged allegiance to an Islamic leader on Facebook at roughly the same time she and her husband opened fire at a holiday office party.
Malik reportedly also used Facebook to privately message friends about her support for Islamic jihad. But she last did so months before the December 2015 attack, so it’s unlikely U.S. government authorities could have picked up on them during her immigration screening process.
Rodriguez drew fire over the social media issue after ABC News reported last year that DHS barred the scrutiny of social media activity in its immigration vetting process.
Rodriguez and other DHS and State Department officials denied that report, but others acknowledged that social media screening wasn’t routinely done. Taylor said the agency had a policy allowing social media scrutiny dating back to 2012.
Since the San Bernardino terrorist attack, Taylor said, DHS launched a task force to streamline its review of social media as a vetting tool because it was “varied across the agency and could benefit from a unified approach.”
