Migrants and refugees, many of them Syrian, rest on the ground as they wait to enter a registration camp after crossing the Greek-Macedonian border on Nov. 18. (Dimitar Dilkoff / AFP/Getty Images)
ishtartv.com - latimes.com
By Del
Quentin Wilber and Brian
Bennett, January 25, 2017
Federal
agents are reinvestigating the backgrounds of dozens of Syrian
refugees already in the United States after discovering a lapse in vetting
that allowed some who had potentially negative information in their
files to enter the country, two U.S. law enforcement officials said.
Agents
have not concluded that any of the refugees should have been rejected for
entry, but the apparent glitch — which was discovered in late 2015
and corrected last year — prevented U.S. officials who conducted
background checks on the refugees from learning about
possible “derogatory” information about them, the two officials said.
At a minimum, the intelligence would have triggered further investigation
that could have led some asylum applications to be rejected.
The
refugees whose cases are under review include one who
failed a polygraph test when he applied to work at a U.S. military
installation overseas and another who may have been in
communication with an Islamic State leader, according to the officials,
who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to
discuss the matter.
The
officials cautioned that the investigations, which began last year under the Obama administration, were preliminary, and often
the initial red flags turn out to be mistakes or benign. For example,
someone could speak to an Islamic State militant without
knowing about that affiliation, they said.
But
the vetting gap raises questions about the Syrian refugee screening
process, which the Obama administration had often described as exhaustive and
rigorous, but which President Trump has criticized as a national
security risk.
President
Obama ramped up the acceptance of Syrians last year to address the
humanitarian crisis in that country, admitting 15,479 Syrian refugees, a
606% increase over the 2,192 admitted in 2015. Since the civil war started, the
U.S. has accepted more than 18,000 Syrians seeking asylum, according to the
State Department.
The
vast majority pose no threat, officials say. Nearly half of the Syrians
admitted since 2011 were under the age of 14, and more than half are female. At
least 4 million people have fled war-torn Syria since the civil war
erupted in 2011.
But
during the fall campaign, Trump argued that terrorists might seek to hide
among refugees like “a great Trojan horse.” He called for “extreme
vetting” and pledged to block Muslims from entering the country. He later
backed off the ban on Muslims and said he would suspend immigration
"from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism." Since
taking office, Trump has been considering a temporary shutdown in the Syrian
refugee program.
The
21-step screening process for Syrian refugees is among the most rigorous
for anyone seeking to enter the United States. Typically, the refugees are
first screened by the United Nations and then referred to the State Department
and other countries for potential resettlement. As they review the applications,
U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials check the names and identities
against databases. The process includes the CIA, the Department of Homeland
Security, the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center, the State Department
and the Department of Defense.
The
results of those checks are passed along to Citizenship and Immigration
Services, which sends officers to foreign countries to interview the
refugees to assess their credibility.
The
vetting gap stemmed from a technological issue that for a period of
time limited how agents searched CIA databases during the background check
process, the officials said. As U.S. intelligence
agents cross-checked refugees’ names and biographical information against
CIA databases, the computer systems were not initially set up to
automatically inspect data contained in “attachments” to
the records, the officials said.
Such
attachments can include cellphone numbers, address books, social media postings,
arrest reports and intelligence assessments, one of the law enforcement
officials said.
The
second law enforcement official likened the problem to searching for a name in
the body of an email but failing to also search for the name in attachments to
the email.
The
increased numbers of Syrians being cleared to enter the U.S. at
first taxed the intelligence agencies responsible for
checking applicants against the vast holdings of the intelligence
community. But the CIA managed to expand the database capabilities early last
year to allow authorities to search the attachments, the officials said.
As
investigators reexamined the cases for red flags, they discovered at least
several dozen that now require further investigation by the FBI and
Department of Homeland Security, the officials said.
If
investigators determine that a refugee is a threat or has ties that would have
blocked his or her entry into the United States, the Justice Department must petition an
immigration judge to remove that person from the country. No such process is
underway, officials said. The Times first learned about the issue from law enforcement
officials before Trump’s inauguration.
Leon
Rodriguez, who served until last week as the director of U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services, defended the integrity of the vetting process his former
agency spearheaded.
“I
still have a lot confidence in what we were doing, especially in the fact that
the people we admitted were thoroughly vetted,” he said. Rodriguez declined to
address any potential vetting gap.
Officials
at the Department of Homeland Security referred calls to Citizenship and
Immigration Services. In a statement, the immigration agency declined to
discuss specifics about the vetting process, but said improvements were
continually being made.
The
immigration agency “continues to work with the law enforcement and intelligence
communities to look for ongoing opportunities for improvements for screening
all categories of applicants, including the security checks for refugee
applicants,” the statement said.
The
CIA declined to comment. A U.S. intelligence official, who requested anonymity
to discuss the closely held vetting process, said refugees go through the
“highest level of security checks” of any type of traveler coming to the
U.S.
“No
immigration program is completely without risk,” the official said. “We
continuously examine options for further enhancements for screening refugees.”
Testifying
before Congress in September, Rodriguez said the U.S. government had
rejected about 7% of applicants and placed another 14% on hold for further
investigation. He noted that since the 2001 terror attacks, “not a single act
of terrorist violence has been committed by a refugee who has undergone our
screening procedures.”
Refugee
applications have been rescreened before. In 2011, the files of more than
58,000 Iraqi refugees already living in the U.S. were vetted after the FBI
learned that an Iraqi man living in Kentucky had participated in roadside bomb
attacks in Iraq before he was granted asylum. He and another Iraqi refugee were
arrested by the FBI and pleaded guilty in 2013 to trying to send
explosives and missiles to the group known as Al Qaeda in Iraq.
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