Deporting The INS

The papers from the Immigration and Naturalization Service arrived in the morning mail at Huffman Aviation International like notices for long-overdue library books. The forms in the envelope that Huffman president Rudi Dekkers opened Monday, March 11, announced that Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi were cleared for takeoff, their M-1 student visas approved for flying lessons--six months to the day after the two terrorists steered hijacked jetliners into oblivion and mass carnage at the World Trade Center towers.

In the bizarre bureaucracy of the INS, the system had functioned precisely as it was designed to, which is why the INS is about to be torn apart. An angry President Bush ordered an investigation when he read about the incident. Furious members of Congress are pushing legislation to gut the INS, a bureaucracy that never had many friends in Washington and is now totally alienated. "We've all been dumbfounded by these revelations," fumed Congressman James Sensenbrenner Jr., who chairs the House Judiciary Committee. "This fiasco is indicative of the enormous mismanagement of the INS."

Sensenbrenner and Pennsylvania's George Gekas want to dismantle the INS and place its functions in two separate agencies overseen by the Justice Department. One would handle immigration services, and the other would be in charge of law enforcement. Another bill, which passed the House last week, would add 1,000 agents to track down unwanted aliens; close the vast loopholes in the student-visa program; allocate $150 million for border-policing technology, including biometrics that could electronically identify fingerprints; and mandate a shared-information platform with the Justice and State departments to keep potential terrorists from falling through the cracks. Even today, for instance, the INS and FBI fingerprint systems can't cross-reference. The same bill has been proposed in the Senate, but it is snarled in a procedural squabble that could delay a vote for another month. INS Commissioner James W. Ziglar tried to quell the revolt in part by joining it. Calling the visa fiasco "unacceptable," he announced a major shake-up, reassigning four senior officials. He too favors separating the agency's enforcement unit from its immigration side. But that might not be enough to placate Sensenbrenner, who wants Ziglar's scalp.

If the INS exhibits outsize incompetence, perhaps it is in proportion to its mission. More than 250 million citizens and noncitizens enter and exit the U.S. each year, many crossing the border repeatedly, and the agency is supposed to keep tabs on all nonresidents. Most foreigners go home when they're supposed to, but as many as 8 million are in the U.S. illegally.