As ISIS continues to ratchet up rhetoric against the United States, ABC News in now reporting the Department of Homeland Security has “lost track” of some 6,000 foreign nationals who entered the U.S. “on student visas, overstayed their welcome, and essentially vanished.”
“Remember after the Boston bombing, we said this was happening. And nobody was talking about it. Now ABC News has confirmed what we told you then,” Glenn said on radio this morning. “The United States government has not gotten any better after 9/11. In fact, it has gotten worse. 6,000 foreign nationals who are here on student visas – they have no idea where they are. They came. They got their student visa, and then they disappeared.”
Peter Edge, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official who oversees investigations into visa violators, told ABC News his “greatest concern” is that these missing persons “could be doing anything.”
“Some of them could be here to do us harm,” Edge said.
It is easy to look at the porous southern border or the two Americans who recently died fighting alongside ISIS in Syria and see the clear potential for danger, but this burgeoning visa issue involves an entirely different kind of security breakdown.
ABC News reports:
Homeland Security officials disclosed the breadth of the student visa problem in response to ABC News questions submitted as part of an investigation into persistent complaints about the nation’s entry program for students.
ABC News found that immigration officials have struggled to keep track of the rapidly increasing numbers of foreign students coming to the U.S. -- now in excess of one million each year. The immigration agency’s own figures show that 58,000 students overstayed their visas in the past year. Of those, 6,000 were referred to agents for follow-up because they were determined to be of heightened concern.
[…]
Edge said ICE agents are trying to locate every one of the 6,000 missing students, but acknowledged that “we really have a lot more work to do” to tighten up the student visa program.
Read the entire ABC News report HERE.
Ultimately, as the Obama Administration continues to downplay the threat of ISIS both at home and abroad, Glenn believes we are running out of time to address our security flaws and lack of strategy.
“We are dismissing these people. The President says he doesn't even have a strategy yet. Those words are going to come to haunt him, I fear, sooner rather than later,” Glenn concluded. “We better develop a strategy. And I don't know what the strategy is. I really don't… There are no good options left. So what do we do? I don't know.”
Front page image courtesy of the AP