Some asylum seekers harassed at U.S. airports, (United Nations confidential report)

WASHINGTON - A confidential report conducted by the United Nations in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security has found that airport inspectors with the power to summarily deport undocumented immigrants have sometimes intimidated and handcuffed travelers fleeing persecution, discouraged some from seeking political asylum and often lacked an understanding of asylum law.

Homeland Security officials say they have responded to the problems identified in the report, which was completed late last year and obtained this week by the New York Times.

But the study highlights the challenges facing the department as it grants border patrol agents sweeping new powers to deport illegal immigrants from the borders with Mexico and Canada without providing them the opportunity to make their case before an immigration judge.

Until now, border patrol agents typically delivered undocumented immigrants to the custody of the immigration courts, where judges determined whether they should be deported or remain in the United States.

Homeland Security officials, who announced the policy shift this week, said border agents would be trained before deporting illegal immigrants to ensure that asylum seekers and legitimate travelers are not mistakenly sent home.

In its report, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees commended the department for working to safeguard people fleeing persecution, noting that most airport inspectors properly identified asylum seekers and correctly referred them for further interviews to ensure that their cases would be heard by an immigration judge.

But the United Nations noted that problems continued to occur at the nation's airports -- where summary deportations have occurred since 1997 -- even after inspectors had received training about the importance of protecting asylum seekers.

The U.N. report found that inspectors at airports often failed to provide certified translators for asylum seekers who did not speak English, improperly notified consulates about the identity and detention of immigrants seeking asylum and, in 14 cases, mistakenly concluded that travelers who expressed a credible fear of persecution were not entitled to apply for asylum.

Joung-ah Ghedini, a spokeswoman for the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, expressed concern about the expansion of summary deportations to the nation's borders. She said the United Nations wanted to know more about the training of border agents to ensure that asylum seekers are protected.

Commissioner Robert Bonner, who heads the customs and border protection unit at the Department of Homeland Security, said the training for border patrol agents would protect asylum seekers, who are entitled to have their cases reviewed by an immigration judge if they express a credible fear of persecution.

He said the training curriculum had been approved by the department's civil rights office and would begin next week in Tucson, Ariz., and the following week in Laredo, Texas, the first places on the border where summary deportations are expected to begin.

Supervisors will receive two days of training and border patrol agents will each typically receive a one-day, eight-hour training session during the next few weeks, officials said.

To conduct its study, U.N. officials reviewed more than 300 case files, interviewed dozens of inspectors, supervisors and asylum officers and sat in on more than 100 interviews with asylum seekers at airports in New York; Newark, N.J.; Miami and Los Angeles.

The Department of Homeland Security granted the United Nations access to internal documents, staff and asylum seekers on the condition that the report not be released to the public after it was completed in late October.

In its report, the United Nations discovered that many inspectors held negative views of asylum seekers, viewing them as frauds trying to enter the United States under false pretenses.

Such attitudes, the report concluded, resulted in instances where inspectors intimidated or treated asylum seekers with derision.

At John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, asylum seekers were routinely handcuffed and restrained with belly chains and leg restraints.

In one instance there, a Liberian asylum seeker was ordered to strip naked to determine whether he had scars consistent with torture. The inspectors then allegedly ridiculed him, using racial and sexual taunts.

Under the new policy, border agents will summarily deport illegal immigrants caught within 100 miles of the Mexican and Canadian borders who have spent up to 14 days within the United States.

U.S. eases tough border policy on visitors: Visitors entering the United States from select countries will no longer risk being handcuffed and treated "as criminals" for minor immigration irregularities, the Bush administration announced Thursday.

The change applies to an estimated 15 million travelers annually from 27 European and Pacific Rim countries whose citizens do not need a visa to enter the United States for personal or business trips of up to 90 days.

Under the new directive, travelers will still be turned away if they pose a security risk, have a criminal record or are judged likely to remain as illegal immigrants.

It is a terrorist's dream. Visa waiver program poses potential for passport fraud
Simplified entry for foreigners from 29 countries

It is a terrorist's dream.

Without having to apply for a visa at a U.S. consulate abroad, millions of people can enter the United States by simply producing a passport from one of 29 countries, ranging from the pocket-sized principality of Andorra to the United Kingdom.

The 17 million people entering the country under the program, which grants waivers for visits up to 90 days, constitute more than half of all foreign visitors to the United States.

And the potential for fraud is considerable.

According to a 1998 Immigration and Naturalization Service estimate, well over 100,000 blank passports have been stolen from government offices in participating countries in recent years.

That's why since Sept. 11 pressures have escalated to reform the Visa Waiver Program as part of an overall effort to prevent foreign terrorists from slipping through the cracks.

Congress made the waivers, a pilot program begun in 1986, permanent last year, despite a March 1999 report from the Justice Department's inspector general that criticized the program as "a threat to national security."

"Some terrorists and criminals applied under the Visa Waiver Program because they believed they would have a greater chance of successful entry," the inspector general concluded.

Supporters of the visa program, however, say that eliminating it would unnecessarily burden consulates and could adversely affect tourism here and abroad.

In INS' defense, Immigration and Naturalization Service officials said that for a decade they had tried to "overcome the lack of law enforcement standards,

and political and diplomatic interests that render the Visa Waiver Program an ineffective risk management system." They said that Congress kept adding more countries to the program "without apparent regard" to obvious problems.

Yet almost nothing was done until two weeks ago, when the State Department dispatched teams to Portugal and the breakaway Balkan republic of Slovenia to resolve unspecified "issues" connected to the program, including "security of documents."

Over the next year, the investigation will be extended to Italy, Uruguay, Argentina and Belgium. Eventually, all 29 countries will be reviewed, according to State Department officials.

One of the waiver program's strongest critics is California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who introduced the Visa Entry Reform Act of 2001 early this month.

The proposed legislation, co-authored with Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., would accelerate the timetable requiring all participating countries to issue machine-readable passports within a year. Under existing law, countries only have to issue such passports by 2007.

In addition, Feinstein's legislation would require participating countries to come up with tamper-resistant passports -- including internationally uniform biometric data like fingerprints -- by 2003.

'WE MUST RESTORE BALANCE'
"We recognize America's openness to newcomers contributes to our strength as a nation," Feinstein said. "But in these unprecedented times, we have seen terrorists take advantage of that openness, and we must now restore balance to our immigration policy by adding some prudent steps to ensure that Americans will be safe."

None of the 19 alleged hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 attacks used visa waivers to enter the United States. All were here on valid student, tourist or business visas issued abroad in U.S. consulates.

But the 1999 Justice Department report described how one of the conspirators convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombings entered the country using an "altered" Swedish passport.

A central problem is that INS inspectors have little time to screen individuals from visa waiver countries for entry -- or even to scrutinize whether the passport they present is fraudulent.

"The Visa Waiver Program puts us in a very vulnerable state," said Paul Smith, a research analyst at the Department of Defense's Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.

In addition, few countries report stolen passport numbers to U.S. immigration officials, Smith said. Belgium alone has lost hundreds of valid passports that have never been reported to authorities in the United States or the European Union.

'INCREDIBLE RISKS'
At a hearing chaired by Feinstein last month, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine warned lawmakers that the program "creates incredible risks" because "inspectors at the port of entry do not have adequate information about suspected terrorists, criminals and others who should not be here."

Compared to many other documents, such as a birth certificate or driver's license, passports are relatively difficult to forge. But immigration experts say that when it comes to finding terrorists, even a small rate of fraud is extremely dangerous.

"It may be that a single case would allow a really bad guy to get a fraudulent passport," said Demetri Papademetriou, co-director of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. "You give someone a quick cursory look, look quickly at the picture, you don't give it a second thought. Sometimes the pictures are old and there's a stamp across the face."

In the weeks after Sept. 11, an assortment of pundits and talk show hosts called for abolishing the Visa Waiver Program. But Steve Garrett, a foreign policy expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, says that would be a serious mistake.

"I just don't think people understand the complexity of this," he said. "Just from an economic point of view, the effect on tourism and trade would be devastating. It doesn't make sense to do something like that because of 20 guys."

IF PROGRAM WERE ABOLISHED
Abolishing the program would require a huge increase in personnel and funding to U.S. consulates, which no longer have the capacity to process millions of visa applications.

"I don't think it is a valuable use of resources to begin issuing visas in those countries," said Susan Martin, director of the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University. "It would mean diverting resources from (countries) where we have real problems."

In addition, nations bumped from the program could retaliate by requiring U. S. citizens to apply for visas in return. That could have the unintended consequence of hampering travel to countries with which the United States has important economic and other ties.

David Martin, a law professor at the University of Virginia, and INS general counsel from 1995 to 1998, said the scrutiny the visa program is receiving could force countries around the world to develop a more uniform and secure system for issuing passports.

At the same time, he cautioned, there are limits to how much security will be achieved through tightening the way the United States issues travel documents.

"We need to measure very carefully the costs of these new measures against what we will be realistically gaining," he said. "There is nothing we can do to make us completely impregnable."

NO VISA NEEDED
Citizens of these nations do not have to apply for visas to visit the United States for up to 90 days: .
Andorra, Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brunei, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and Uruguay.

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