USA to Establish a Plan to Track Visa Overstayers

United States Administration may not have deportation of visa overstay violators on the priority, however, the US Homeland Security Department is ready to put in place a biometric identification system that will be able to identify foreigners who have overstayed their visas with in next fee weeks.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) started to create a system that could check the biometrics and photographs of visitors entering United States as well as during the exit about a decade ago. However, for some reason the checking of fingerprints at exit component of the system that may raise flag for overstayed visas was not completed.

DHS Deputy Counterterrorism Coordinator John Cohen told lawmakers that his department will give all the details on an automated arrangement for collecting biometric markers and feeding it to the law enforcement and intelligence agencies in order to identify the visa overstays.

The system will also help the immigration authorities to locate the illegal foreigners who are not identified as threat to either public safety or national security.

Mr. Cohen said, “It’s going to be within weeks – not months, not years.” He further said, it “would be our intention” to put forth the plan within the next 30 days.

“Under the proposed plan, law enforcing authorities will be able to instantly pull up an offender’s or non-offender’s immigration records and biometric markers,” he said.

“The government already is able to vet visitor records from multiple databases for national security and public safety threats,” Cohen added.

“So, today, if someone is arrested for any type of offense, part of the query that will take place will be an automatic check of immigrations systems – it will be a check of TECS as well,” he said.

“The chances are greatly enhanced that today if somebody were to be booked on a minor drug offense or a serious traffic violation even, the person’s immigration status would come to our attention,” Cohen said.

There is no doubt that using biometrics and linking the immigration data with other databases and ability to find out about the immigration status of a person will be a step forward towards tracking the visa overstaying foreigners. However, how quickly they will be packed back to their homeland will depend on the level of Obama administration’s priority on this issue.

Tags: Illegal immigrants, Illegal migrants, United States, United States of America, USA Visit Visa, visit visa