ASHINGTON, June 4 — The Justice Department will propose new regulations this week requiring tens of thousands of Muslim and Middle Eastern visa holders to register with the government and be fingerprinted, administration officials said today.
The initiative, the subject of intense debate within the administration, is designed for "individuals from countries who pose the highest risk to our security," including most visa holders from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and many other Muslim nations, officials said. More than 100,000 foreigners, including students, workers, researchers and tourists, all foreigners from designated countries who do not hold green cards, would probably be covered by the plan, an official said.
Antiterrorism teams made up of federal, state and local officers that have been formed in most larger cities since the Sept. 11 attacks would help immigration officials register visa holders already living here, using procedures similar to those employed to find 5,000 mainly Middle Eastern men who were sought for interviews after the attacks.
New arrivals from the designated countries would be fingerprinted at airports or seaports and be required to register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service after 30 days in the country, officials said.
Violators could be fined, refused re-entry into the United States or possibly deported, officials said.
The plan will be published in the Federal Register. After a comment period, it will become a Justice Department regulation.
The proposal ignited a raging debate in the Bush administration. White House officials supported the Justice proposal, but the State Department lodged objections, fearing diplomatic repercussions with allies in the war on terror, administration officials said.
A Justice Department spokeswoman, Susan Dryden, declined to comment on the proposal.
Immigration specialists, meantime, are warning of new backlogs at airports if already understaffed immigration service inspectors are required to fingerprint and process a new category of visitors.
But some civil liberties and Arab-American groups expressed outrage at the proposed requirements, arguing that such a policy was a blatant example of racial and ethnic profiling.
"What's the logic of this?" said Jeanne Butterfield, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. "Anyone who's truly dangerous is not going to show up to be registered."
James J. Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, a policy organization, said the registration plan would be "an overtly discriminatory, inefficient and ineffective way to deal with the problem."
"This is targeting a group of people, the overwhelming majority of whom are innocent, but whose lives will be turned upside down," Mr. Zogby added. "The message it sends is that we're becoming like the Soviet Union, with people registering at police stations."
The authority for proposing the new registration requirements rests in a long-dormant provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, administration officials said.
A section of that law requires all foreign visa holders to register with the government if they remain in the United States for 30 days or longer. The law also required the fingerprinting of virtually all foreigners who were not permanent residents, except for diplomats.
The law remained on the books, but enforcement fell off in the early 1980's when the volume of visa holders climbed rapidly and the immigration service's budget and staffing dropped.
"By the early 1980's, the sheer volume of the effort combined with a lack of funding resulted in the practice being discontinued," said one administration official.
In 1979, the same year as the beginning of the Iranian hostage crisis, Iranian students were required to register with the government. After the attacks last year, most visa holders from Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Libya were fingerprinted as they entered the United States.
But the terrorist attacks had given fresh impetus to a much broader program. One administration official said the new registration proposal, which Justice officials planned to brief to Congress on Wednesday and announce later this week, would give the government a leg up on identifying the highest-risk foreign visitors now living in the United States.
Congress has required that the Immigration and Naturalization Service establish a system to monitor the entry and departure of all immigrants, beginning in 2003.
But other officials said the contentious proposal broke free from an internal administration debate only amid the recent recriminations over what intelligence the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency and other federal agencies possessed before Sept. 11 about the possibilities of a terrorist attack.
One of the leaders of the interagency discussion on the alien registration proposal is a conservative University of Missouri at Kansas City law professor, Kris W. Kobach, officials said.
Although Mr. Kobach, 36, is only a White House fellow on temporary assignment to the Justice Department, he also played a central role in another contentious proposal to give state and local police departments the power to track down illegal immigrants as a new tactic in the global war on terror.