Deporting The INS

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When Atta and Al-Shehhi showed up at Huffman Aviation on July 1, 2000, they were holding tourist visas. Huffman enrolled both, charging Al-Shehhi $20,000 and Atta, who had a private pilot's license, $18,700. Huffman regularly trained foreign students (a lucrative business for flying schools), so the two raised no suspicions. A month later, the school's student coordinator, Nicole Antini, helped Atta and Al-Shehhi file the appropriately bureaucratic form, the Certificate of Eligibility for Nonimmigrant (M-1) Student Status for Vocational Students, to change their visa status from tourist to student. These applications joined about 7.3 million other such annual filings for status changes.

The INS approved both visas about a year later--Atta's on July 17, 2001, and Al-Shehhi's on Aug. 9, 2001. They promptly received formal notices from the INS. By then, of course, both students had finished their training; Huffman had been under no legal obligation to wait for INS approval before enrolling them. No background check had been required, and even if it had been, neither Atta nor Al-Shehhi was in the FBI or CIA databases as a suspected al-Qaeda operative.

The forms Huffman received last week were merely copies of the stamped approvals for the hijackers. The school's copies arrived so late because the documents came from an outsource firm, Affiliated Computer Services Inc. of London, Ky., whose contract with the INS required it to store the forms for six months before sending them back to the school, according to the company. ACS, which gets $3 billion in government business every year, now must return INS-processed M-1 visa applications within 30 days.

The visa changes are emblematic of the groaning information gap the INS or its successor has to fill. The bipartisan bill, which passed the House and which Jon Kyl, Dianne Feinstein, Ted Kennedy and Sam Brownback are sponsoring in the Senate, requires Justice and State to issue travel documents, such as visas, that are machine readable and tamper resistant and have biometric identifiers. The two departments must install equipment and software to allow biometric comparisons of travel documents at all U.S. ports of entry. All commercial flights and vessels coming into the U.S. will be required to provide manifest information prior to arrival.

The bill eliminates the 45-minute INS time limit for clearing arriving passengers. That regulation was created because in another era everyone from Congressmen to customs agents believed that getting into the U.S. shouldn't be an ordeal. The welcome mat was already being pulled back after Sept. 11. Now it may disappear, along with the INS.