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-Cp
05-18-2007, 01:40 AM
Terrorists in the File Cabinet?
Three of the Fort Dix suspects entered the United States illegally more than two decades ago. How tighter immigration enforcement might have prevented the possible plot before it was ever dreamt up.

May 16, 2007 - The arrest last week of three New Jersey terror suspects who entered the United States illegally more than two decades ago is raising new questions about weaknesses in American immigration controls before and after 9/11. NEWSWEEK has learned that an application for asylum filed in 1989 by the family of three suspects in the New Jersey plot stalled inside the federal bureaucracy for 16 years due to a paperwork “backlog.”

Federal immigration officials finally took a more careful look at the family's immigration history two years ago, and recommended a more thorough investigation by the FBI and Homeland Security agents into possible immigration fraud, according to a source familiar with the case who asked not to be named talking about sensitive material. But before anything came of that investigation, the FBI and local authorities launched a separate undercover operation which resulted in the suspects' arrest last week on charges of plotting to shoot soldiers at Fort Dix, allegedly using assault rifles and machine guns.

The story of how immigration officials apparently fumbled or lost track of the immigration file on the Duka family of Cherry Hill, N.J., three of whose members are charged in the alleged Fort Dix plot, is certain to provide new fodder for critics of the U.S. immigration system. Immigration-reform advocates say the case shows that tighter immigration enforcement could help prevent terror attacks—although authorities have said the suspected ringleader of the New Jersey plot (not a member of the Duka family) was actually a naturalized U.S. citizen. Besides the three members of the Duka family, authorities have detained three other suspects.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a private group that lobbies for tougher U.S. immigration controls, complained that government oversights like the ones that evidently plagued the Duka case are “par for the course” in what he calls “our don’t ask, don’t tell immigration system. We make it as easy as possible for illegal aliens to live here. 'No' never means 'no'.” Krikorian said that immigration bureaucrats were less at fault for these kinds of delays than policy makers who fail to make sure that laws on the books are vigorously enforced.

The source familiar with the Duka case said that the three Duka brothers—Dritan, Eljvir and Shain—are believed to have first entered the United States illegally in 1984 by crossing from Mexico at Brownsville, Texas.

In 1989, federal immigration records indicate, the Duka brothers' father contacted U.S. immigration authorities seeking to regularize the status of several members of the family—including Dritan, Eljvir and Shain—through a claim of asylum, said the source familiar with the family's immigration history. Further details of the Duka family’s asylum claim could not be immediately determined. But to obtain asylum in the United States, foreigners must usually demonstrate to immigration authorities that they have a well-founded fear of being persecuted—usually for religious or political reasons—if they were to return to their home countries.

As a result, for nearly two decades, American authorities were aware that members of the family were inside the United States, and that they had probably come here illegally. While the asylum application was under consideration, the government effectively suspended any effort to deport family members as illegal aliens, the source familiar with their immigration history said.

After the Duka’s filed the asylum application, it languished for 16 years in the bowels of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the notoriously inefficient Justice Department agency which was responsible for processing—and, where appropriate, deporting—immigrants to the United States. (After 9/11, the agency was absorbed by Homeland Security). A U.S. official familiar with immigration procedures said that the asylum claim may have bogged down because Congress had limited the number of asylum-seekers who could be granted permanent resident status to 10,000 a year. The official said this limitation meant that even if asylum seekers' claims of persecution were legitimate, waits of 16 years or more for a green card were not unusual.

However, another official familiar with the Duka case history said that the family asylum claim got stuck for 16 years at INS because of a bureaucratic paperwork backlog of more than 100,000 asylum applications. The official said asylum claims routinely sat in “filing cabinets” for a decade or more.

Chris Bentley, a spokesman for the Homeland Security Department’s Citizenship and Immigration Services bureau, which is now in charge of immigration applications, said privacy laws prohibit his agency from discussing the details of any individual’s immigration file or history.

The Duka family’s immigration record shows that in 1995—six years after the family’s initial asylum application was filed with the government—the family tried to take advantage of a new immigration lottery system that granted lucky applicants permanent residence status based partly on ethnic diversity. But this application also apparently ended up in some kind of bureaucratic limbo, according to a source familiar with the case who also asked not to be named.

Then, in 2001, Dritan Duka—one of the brothers arrested last week—married a U.S. citizen. But the family's immigration record also indicates that he apparently did not apply for a green card based on his marriage until 2005, according to the source familiar with the family's history.

By 2005, the former INS bureaucracy had been transferred from the Justice Department to the new Department of Homeland Security, where officials were under pressure from Congress and the public to eliminate immigration backlogs and crack down on aliens who had entered the United States illegally.

By late 2005, said the source familiar with the Duka's immigration history, Homeland Security officials had taken a look at the Dukas’s suspicious file and notified both the new Homeland investigations bureau, known as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and the FBI. Before a thorough immigration fraud investigation could be conducted, however, the Philadelphia-area Joint Terrorism Task Force, responding to a tip-off from a Circuit City clerk who was disturbed at the contents of a video a customer wanted to have copied, launched the undercover terrorism investigation which last week resulted in the arrests of three Duka brothers and three other men on charges of plotting to attack Fort Dix and other targets in the New Jersey area.

The Duka brothers and the three other defendants in the case are currently being held in custody without bail on temporary charges filed by the Feds. The temporary charges are expected to be superseded by a criminal indictment in the near future, said Michael Riley, a lawyer for Shain Duka, one of the arrested brothers. Shain Duka, his brothers Dritan and Eljvir, and the three other men arrested in the case all maintain their innocence, Riley said. He added that it is his understanding that details obtained by NEWSWEEK about the Duka family’s immigration history are “pretty accurate.” Lawyers for the other Duka brothers did not immediately respond to messages requesting comment, and members of the Duka family did not respond when a NEWSWEEK reporter knocked at the door of the family home in Cherry Hill, N.J., last week.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18705586/site/newsweek/page/3/

Hobbit
05-18-2007, 02:29 AM
I'm about as shocked as I was the last time I looked up and saw that the sky was blue.

Doniston
05-18-2007, 11:26 AM
I'm about as shocked as I was the last time I looked up and saw that the sky was blue. It is stories like these that sometimes promts me to don my Tin-foil hat. This wasn't a consiracy, but a stupidity, that at last count, contuinued for the past 18 months, and at this pont, I am beginning to wonder at it's authenticity. At best, a "comedy of ERRONITIES" (Errors)