When any foreign national is encountered entering the United States at a port of entry or in between ports of entry, their basic information, including their name, place of origin, and purpose of entry, is collected.
But how do we know that they really are who they say they are? We don’t, for the most part, because we aren’t effectively vetting them, according to a newly released Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s report.
By some estimates, more than 10 million illegal immigrants, excluding nonvisa holders and travelers, have entered the U.S. over the past 3 1/2 years. Some unknown number of them are certainly criminals, spies, and terrorists.
While Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and other officials insist that these immigrants are being vetted, they rarely specify what it means and how it works.
In fact, those crossing the border do not have to provide any verifiable government identification during processing. If a foreign national appears with scant documents, or none at all, authorities are left with accepting their attested identity at face value.
Even if a would-be entrant does provide documentation, authorities have limited capability and capacity to verify the authenticity of their documents.
The biometric data, including fingerprints and photographs, and biographical data, such as self-reported names and place of origin, we collect are only useful if they can be matched to a database. According to a government watchdog, the DHS only managed to collect 40% of entrants’ DNA despite it being required by law.
However, there is no global identity database that can “prove” that illegal immigrants are who they say they are, let alone allow us to meaningfully vet their criminal histories or affiliations.
Instead, authorities rely almost exclusively on a few rather limited and imperfect sources.
One is the Terrorist Screening Database, commonly called the “terror watch list” or “national watchlist,” comprising people believed to be connected to terrorism or other threats to the homeland. The watchlist is compiled by the intelligence community and law enforcement agencies.
Most flagged people are eventually released if officials cannot fully establish that the person poses an immediate and identifiable threat. In 2023, two known terrorist suspects, one Lebanese and one Somali, were later captured after being released at the border months earlier.
Others from countries of concern called “Special Interest Aliens” usually cannot be deported and are not being detained. Hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from special interest countries have been apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border since 2021, and most were released into the U.S.
These databases only include information on people who have been previously identified and whose activities or affiliations warrant scrutiny.
The second check is the National Criminal Information Center database, which compiles the criminal histories of people known to domestic law enforcement. It details arrest histories, convictions, aliases, and other biographic information. But it only applies to those who have encountered the U.S. justice system before.
Similarly, the DHS’s Automated Biometric Identification System, which tracks people who have previously encountered the U.S. immigration system and pulls from other government databases, isn’t even close to perfect. In June, the DHS inspector general reported that technical difficulties left out 10% of federal records.
Other checks are equally vulnerable to providing a false sense of security. INTERPOL, the international policing cooperation organization, only shares with partner nations a tiny fraction of offenders’ criminal histories — usually fugitives and high-risk targets. Run-of-the-mill rapists, gang members, and killers aren’t routinely flagged.
Those checks are only applied to those who are encountered and processed. Since 2021, the U.S. Border Patrol estimates that nearly 2 million people have crossed as “got-a-ways,” so their presence, location, and identities are unknown to U.S. authorities.
And many of those crossing the border are from hostile or at least noncooperative nations. Since 2021, over 100,000 Chinese national single adults and another 75,000 single adult Russians have been encountered by the Border Patrol — the vast majority released into the U.S. with a notice to appear for a court date scheduled years from now. Even if those people were ordered deported, their home countries routinely refuse to accept them.
Venezuela, one of the largest sources of recent illegal immigrants, is not sharing information with the U.S. and disallows the U.S. from repatriating its criminal citizens. Illegal immigrants affiliated with its notorious gang, Tren de Aragua, have committed horrendous crimes in the U.S. and put a bounty on the heads of U.S. law enforcement officers.
Thanks to a 2001 Supreme Court decision barring the indefinite detention of deportable criminals if their country of origin won’t take them back, many of these deportable immigrants will eventually be free to stay.
Those countries who willingly cooperate in vetting their citizens rarely have accurate or robust records, and U.S. personnel do not have direct access. They may be willing but are not able to help us vet immigrants in volume.
In June, the DHS inspector general blew the whistle on the agency’s security charade, writing that unless we get serious about vetting, “DHS will remain at risk of admitting dangerous persons into the country or enabling asylum seekers who may pose significant threats to public safety and national security to continue to reside in the United States.”
Often Immigration and Customs Enforcement only establishes a criminal immigrant’s real identity after they committed new crimes here.
A Peruvian gang leader wanted in connection with 23 murders there entered in May and was issued a “notice to appear” and released months before being arrested in August. Last month, police captured an accused killer from the Dominican Republic who used fraudulent documents to enter the U.S. mainland before allegedly murdering a family of four and setting fire to their home in upstate New York.
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The influx of illegal immigrants has abetted the surge in border crossers who go undetected and entirely unvetted. A got-a-way from Guatemala sought for two slayings there crossed the border now stands accused of a “gruesome” double murder in Florida. An MS-13 gang member wanted for a killing in El Salvador made his way all the way to Queens, New York, undetected before being nabbed with a gun and drugs by ICE agents.
In fact, we don’t know who many of the millions of recent illegal immigrants are, where they are, or even why they are here. That’s not “rigorous” vetting — that’s dangerous and vexing.
Rodney Scott is a former chief of the U.S. Border Patrol and a board member of the Coalition for Law, Order, and Safety. This op-ed was co-authored by Sean Kennedy, who is the Coalition for Law, Order, and Safety’s executive director.