WASHINGTON, 22 November 2003 — After months of protests from immigration lawyers and advocates, the Department of Homeland Security has announced plans to dump its visitor-registration program specifically designed to target Muslim men traveling to the US.
Critics maintain the system alienated thousands of law-abiding Muslim visitors while doing little to protect national security.
The announcement comes as officials prepare to launch new border controls at the start of next year. The new plan, called US Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program, or US VISIT, will basically serve the same purpose of registering a visitor by photographing and fingerprinting them. The difference is, however, that US VISIT will register all visitors as they enter and exit the United States.
Its critics called the special registration program a fiasco; they said it caused widespread confusion to those trying to act in accordance with the law. Thousands of people who complied with the ruling were arrested and deported.
“Our stand has always been that those types of programs require a lot of resources but do not actually address the problem. Muslims from various countries end up being targeted on the basic of their ethnicity or religion, which limits the law enforcement’s ability to thoroughly track down those who are a real threat to our country,” said Rabeah Ahmed, communication coordinator at CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
“The program discouraged a lot of legitimate travelers from coming to America because of the heightened scrutiny and it created a distrust among the community toward the government,” said Ahmed.
Since coming into effect in November 2002, the program registered more than 83,000 visitors to the US. Nearly 14,000 foreign nationals who showed up for the registration were placed in deportation proceedings.