DHS undertakes visa overstay info sharing pilot
20.05.12
An information sharing pilot underway involving US-VISIT, Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement should improve the department's ability to identify foreign nationals who have overstayed their visas, DHS says in a privacy impact assessment dated Dec. 29.
The pilot is being conducted in the expectation it will become a permanent fixture, the assessment adds. US-VISIT came under criticism in 2011 for allowing a backlog of 1.6 million records of potential visa overstays to accumulate, although DHS officials said in July they managed to reduce it by more than half.
One reason for the backlog growth was a manually-intensive process for checking the status of travelers. According to the assessment, before the pilot, US-VISIT would automatically check the records of a potential overstay against three federal systems--but any record that couldn't be closed during those automated searches would then require manual checks against up to 12 databases.
Source: Fierce Homeland Security