DHS CATCHES LESS THAN 1 % OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT 'OVERSTAYS'

DHS catches less than 1 percent of illegal immigrant ‘overstays’: Audit

By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Thursday, May 4, 2017

The deadline was nearly a decade ago yet Homeland Security still can’t track when visitors to the U.S. leave the country — leaving deportation officers struggling to try to find millions of people who have managed to disappear into the shadows, according to a new watchdog report Thursday.

Officers have to use 27 different computer systems to try to figure out if someone actually left the country when they were supposed to, presenting a gargantuan task that often stymies their efforts to spot and kick out illegal immigrants, the Homeland Security inspector general reported.

And the data the officers are using is so bad that they often get false negatives, meaning a target appears to have left the country even though they never did — allowing criminals to remain at large in the U.S. without anyone looking for them.

“Such false departure information resulted in ERO officers closing visa overstay investigations of dangerous individuals, such as suspected criminals, who were actually still in the United States and could pose a threat to national security,” the investigators said in the report. “For example, [a deportation] officer stated that a suspect under investigation was listed as having left the country, but had given his ticket to a family member and was still residing in the United States.”

Visa overstays, as they are called, are an increasing focus of the immigration debate. As the flow of new illegal immigrants across the border declines, an increasing percentage of those in the country illegally are travelers who came on a business, tourist or student visa, but didn’t leave when their time was up.

Several of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers were overstays.

A messy data situation hinders U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers’ efforts to track overstays, the new audit says.

Looking at just one portion of visitors in 2015, Homeland Security reported more than 500,000 overstays that year. But ICE agents and officers only arrested 3,402 potential overstays in 2015 — or only one for every 250.

Time is also wasted on bogus leads, the report said. The data is so unreliable that officers and agents often end up finding an overstay still in the country who the systems said had already left, or spend time trying to track down someone who actually did leave the country or got legal status.

“An ICE officer estimated that he spent more than 50 hours on a single suspect, only to find the individual had applied for [an immigration] benefit and should not have been categorized as an overstay,” the audit said.

In its official response, ICE said it’s trying to do a better job of calculating the number of visa overstays.

President Trump has pushed Homeland Security to finish the system that would track departures, and tests are being run at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta.

The department also plans to release its next overstay report “soon.” That report will cover 97 percent of those admitted on visitor visas.

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