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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epsteinbd who wrote (17652)	11/8/2002 2:37:01 PM
From: lorne	Respond to of 23908

U.S. Nabs 179 at Borders Under Post-Sept 11 Rules November 07, 2002 04:33 PM ET BUFFALO, New York (Reuters) - U.S. border agents have arrested 179 people under rules adopted on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks that mandate the fingerprinting of travelers requiring visas, U.S. Attorney-General John Ashcroft said on Thursday. Ashcroft told reporters at the U.S.-Canada border overlooking Niagara Falls that those arrested were felons who fled the United States after committing an offense on a previous visit, people with a serious criminal record or those attempting to enter the country under false pretenses. He said that before Sept. 11, "our borders did not have an efficient system to protect us from enemies treading on American soil" and that the new program tracked the whereabouts of people going in and out of the United States. Under the system, a visitor is fingerprinted when he arrives at a U.S. land, air or sea port. The print is then matched against the FBI's criminal and other wanted-persons databases and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service database of suspected terrorists. "For the first time we have an understanding of when people enter or exit," Ashcroft said. He said the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System could be applied to find nonresidents "who may pose an elevated security risk" and register them. Ashcroft said of 14,000 people checked under the new system throughout the United States, 179 from 112 countries had been arrested. The new rules generated controversy in Canada, where the government pressured Washington to exempt Canadians born in Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Sudan from being fingerprinted and photographed before entering the United States. Washington has placed those five countries on a list of those it accuses of supporting terrorism. The new fingerprinting system was primarily designed to keep track of the movements of people from those five countries, but Ashcroft said on Thursday that in terms of the origin of visitors, no country was exempt. Canada immediately said it would seek a clarification of his remarks, which seemed to fly in the face of earlier assurances that Canadians born in the five countries would be largely exempt from the new rules. "If you start checking everybody because they are from a certain ethnic group it's going to slow down the border, it's going to go against everything we've worked for," said Herb Dhaliwal, Canada's Indian-born energy minister. "Frankly most Canadians and Americans would feel it's an affront to do it on the basis of the way you look, the basis of your ethnicity or the basis of your race, and that's why I've said racial profiling is totally unacceptable," he told reporters in Ottawa. reuters.com