The federal government is also taking steps to widen the use of local and state police for arrests of people on immigration charges.

Current regulations require the registration and fingerprinting of citizens from Iran, Iraq, Sudan, and Libya. Under the new plan Syria will be added to the list, as well as other countries that the State Department and the INS "determine to be an elevated security risk."

A Justice Department fact sheet states that the attorney general has the authority to expand the list of countries through the publication of a Federal Register notice. U.S. government officials said the program will focus initially on those from about 20 Muslim and Middle Eastern countries who are deemed "security risks." Agency officials said the list will also include Cuba and north Korea.

According to Ashcroft, this will be the first phase of a system allowing authorities to monitor any of the 35 million visitors who come to the United States each year. Dubbed the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, the program mandates visitors over age 14 who hold nonimmigrant visas to comply with the new rules before they are allowed into the country. Their fingerprints, photographs, and other information would be matched against a federal database and put into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) maintained by the FBI. Immigrants with green cards supposedly would not be affected by the new rules.

Those staying more than one month would be forced to periodically register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). They would also have to submit information on employment or enrollment at a school, along with their street and e-mail addresses and telephone number. Foreign visitors would have to register every year or face fines, imprisonment or deportation. They would also be required to inform the INS when leaving the country.

The new rules are based on the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act. This law broadened the basis for the exclusion and deportation of noncitizens and introduced the "alien address report system" requiring all immigrants in the United States (including most temporary visitors) to report their current address to the INS. Under this law the attorney general can order the fingerprinting and registration of "any class of aliens, other than those admitted for permanent residence," according to the Justice Department.

Once again justifying an assault on workers rights under the pretext of the campaign against terrorism, Ashcroft declared, "In this new war, our enemies’ platoons infiltrate our borders quietly, blending in with visitors and tourists and students and workers."  
 
Use of local cops
The 650,000 local and state cops across the country would be checking the NCIC "regularly in the course of traffic stops and routine encounters," said the Attorney General. Ashcroft said he would ask the nation’s cops to "undertake voluntarily" the task of "arresting aliens who have violated criminal provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act or civil provisions that render an alien deportable."

Currently state and city police departments do not make arrests on civil immigration violations. In 1996 the Clinton administration signed into law a measure authorizing the attorney general to make agreements with local and state governments to enforce immigration laws. Now the Justice Department has drafted a legal opinion arguing that cops have the "inherent authority" to enforce immigration laws. Pilot programs have been developed in Florida and South Carolina to implement this measure.

The move to involve police departments in such activity has sparked an exchange of conflicting views among cop officials and other bourgeois political figures. "It’s political dynamite," said a police department official in Chicago. "We have an executive order from the mayor’s office where we don’t do anything with immigration. When we stop someone, we don’t ask them what their alien status is."

"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," wrote New York Times reporter Eric Schmitt. He noted that the "antiterrorism teams" would use "procedures similar to those employed to find 5,000 mainly Middle Eastern men" who were sought for interrogations allegedly in connection with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, according to the June 6 Washington Post, the focus on citizens from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and Syria would prompt "immediate complaints that the system amounted to racial profiling of Middle Eastern visitors."

"This is going to lead to enormous racial profiling," said Cecilia Muñoz, vice president of policy for the National Council of La Raza.

Hussein Ibish, a spokesman for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said the approach of the government to "view the immigrant population in general as suspicious and dangerous... includes a pretty big group of people."

Of the 31 million immigrants living in the country an estimated 8.5 million are without legal documents. The INS has established a new Bureau of Immigration Enforcement that will oversee border patrols, investigations, and spying operations as part of a projected crackdown on the approximately 3 million noncitizens who carry expired visas.

Many of those whose papers are not "in order" are working people, employed across the country in factories, mills, field jobs, restaurants and other industries. They have increasingly joined struggles for workers’ rights, led union organizing drives, participated in social protest actions, and fought attempts to criminalize and dehumanize sections of the working class.

The regulations are the first step in meeting a bipartisan Congressional mandate for developing a system to monitor all those who travel to the United States, said Ashcroft. The INS announced in early May that a new tracking system to monitor 1 million foreign students would be up and running in a several months. The system will link every U.S. embassy and consulate abroad with every INS port of entry in the country.
 
 
Related article:
U.S. gov’t begins jailing citizens without charges
First fruits of ‘preemptive action’ at home and abroad
Washington’s preemptive actions
Other cases of illegal detention by U.S. gov’t  
 
 
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