Free Republic

From Sunday, non-EU travelers entering Europe’s Schengen open-borders zone will be photographed and fingerprinted at border crossings, as the European Union rolls out its much-delayed automated border checks. The aim of the new system is to eventually replace the manual stamp on passports and secure better information-sharing between the bloc’s 27 states. The border-check system will allow authorities to know when people entered and exited a country, with the goal of better detecting anyone overstaying and people refused entry. […] Non-EU nationals arriving for short stays in EU countries — except Cyprus and Ireland — will be asked for their...

The European Union has ordered Sweden to end its border controls by mid-November, saying the reasons for putting them into place don’t exist anymore. At a press conference in Brussels on Wednesday, the EU’s migrant commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos said it will not allow the Nordic country to extend its border controls between Sweden and Denmark. “There won’t be an extension. The border controls are coming to an end in two months. The prerequisites for granting [the extensions] don’t exist anymore.” During the height of Europe’s migrant crisis, Sweden was, along with Denmark, Germany, Austria and Norway, granted an exception from...

Sweden will extend border controls and ID checks in the south of the country by a further three months, the country's government has confirmed. The border controls at ports in the south of Sweden and on the Swedish side of the Öresund Bridge to Denmark were brought in during the autumn of 2015, a year where Sweden received a record 163,000 asylum applications. ID checks on trains crossing the Öresund Bridge were introduced soon after. The measures in the passport-free Schengen zone are only supposed to be temporary and originally designed to last six months, but they were extended by...

Computerized security measures inaugurated after 9/11, intended to help in the war against terrorism by foreigners, are providing an addition benefit: the apprehension of U.S. citizens wanted by police. Since the terror attacks in 2001, immigration computers have been hooked up to the database of criminal records and terrorist watch lists maintained by the FBI. The computers are in use at airports, most border crossings and in domestic immigration offices that handle applications for permanent residency and citizenship. ~snip~Among those caught at the Mexican border were a North Carolina man wanted for multiple sex crimes involving children, and a fugitive...