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NEWS BYTES
This week it was announced that President Bush will meet with Mexican President Fox next month to discuss immigration proposals that were lost in the wake of the September 11th attacks. The meeting will occur in late August when Fox spends a few days in Texas. Before September 11th, there appeared to be general agreement that some way to legalize Mexican immigrants in the US was needed, but the consensus was lost when immigration became a national security concern.
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US Attorneys in Southern California are losing more cases involving immigration violations than they did a few years ago, according to a new student. In 2001, the successful prosecution rate was 77 percent, down from 89 percent in 1997. In the rest of the country, however, the success rate increased, from 77 percent in 1997 to 87 percent last year. Nationally, 93 percent of cases referred by the INS for prosecution were taken to court, compared with 99.7 percent of cases in Southern California. An INS spokesperson says ones reason for the low success rate in Southern California is that more cases involving smuggling and fraud rings, which are difficult cases to bring, are prosecuted there. The report, from Syracuse University, is available online at http://trac.syr.edu/tracins/index.html
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Officials have begun investigating whether Samuel G. Kooritzky, the lawyer who was arrested last week on charges of filing thousands of fraudulent applications for labor certifications in Virginia, may have committed the same fraud in other states. The information was revealed in a hearing for Kooritzky’s accused conspirator, Ronald W. Bogardus, a contractor for the State Department. At the hearing, federal agents testified that they found nearly one million dollars in cash during a search of his apartment, three passports, train tickets, and a bank account containing $2.5 million. Bogardus was denied bail and will be held in jail until his trial. Kooritzky was released after turning over his passport. According to an immigration lawyer present at the hearing, Kooritzky did substantial advertising in Asian communities, promising not only legal help but also help in finding a sponsoring employer.
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This week the Federal Aviation Administration announced rules that will make it harder for nationals of countries designated as state sponsors of terrorism to obtain licenses to pilot private planes in the US. In the past, they were allowed to fly on the basis of their foreign pilot’s license. Now, they will be subject to a background check, including verification of the foreign license, before being given certification to fly in the US. The rules were changed to prevent the use of private planes the way jetliners were used on September 11th.
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When the Justice Department announced last month that it would begin fingerprinting nonimmigrants from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria, it said that the checks would only take three minutes, and that the technology to fully check the fingerprints already existed. Many, including some experts from the Justice Department, are concerned that the process will not be as smooth as promised. According to FBI officials, it will take years to makes its fingerprint database compatible with the INS’s. The primary problem is that the FBI takes high-quality prints from all ten fingers, while the INS only takes prints from the index fingers. This, combined with concerns that targeting nationals from specific countries will single out innocent people and could miss real threats, has caused many to question whether such a plan will be helpful. In the 11 years it has been fingerprinting selected people, the INS has taken 54,000 sets of prints, none of whom was ever linked to terrorism.
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The person named by President Bush to take over the State Department Bureau of Consular Affairs, which is responsible for issuing visas, is coming under fire from children’s advocates who say that she failed to protect US citizen children who had been kidnapped. Critics say that Maura Harty, while serving as the director of the Office of Children's Issues of the State Department, was indifferent to the plight of parents and their children who had been kidnapped. Harty is named to replace Mary Ryan, who resigned after her office was criticized for being too lax in issuing visas.
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Two college students in San Diego have agreed to stand trial in New Jersey on charges that they committed fraud to help other students pass the Test of English as a Foreign Language, required of foreign students by many schools. The two are among 64 people who were arrested earlier this summer when officials discovered the fraud ring.
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A Florida immigrant this week pled guilty to charges of scouting out locations in south Florida for terrorist attacks. Officials hope that by cooperating, Shueyb Mossa Jokhan will help strengthen the case against his alleged co-conspirator, Imran Mandhai. Officials do not think that either man has any connections to Al-Qaeda or had any knowledge of the September 11th attacks.
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The INS recently deported a Guatemalan woman after a Service error caused her to miss a court date. The notice Lizbeth Sanchez received listed the wrong court date, and when she appeared at the time on the notice, she was told that she had been ordered deported. The request to reopen the case was denied, but she and her husband, and naturalized US citizen also from Guatemala, thought that their marriage would keep her from being deported. Last month, they went to an INS interview where she was arrested, spending 17 days in jail before she was deported.
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Authorities recently announced that a man suspected of selling fraudulent identification documents to two of the September 11th hijackers fled the US shortly before police came to arrest him. According to officials, Mohamed El-Atriss, a naturalized US citizen who is facing a variety of document fraud charges, was questioned shortly after the attacks and was found to have no knowledge of the hijackers’ intentions.
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