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. In September, John Cohen, DHS principal deputy coordinator for counterterrorism, told a House Homeland Security subcommitttee that the department has screened the remainder of the records for national security and public safety threats.

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.

Under procedures set up in the pilot, US-VISIT now typically emails on a weekly basis an encrypted list of system-generated overstay leads to CBP and USCIS, where the records are checked against multiple databases. For example, USCIS runs the file against its CLAIMS 3 system, which contains information about immigration benefit applications and decisions.

US-VISIT then receives the list back from the other components, conducts manual searches on records not eliminated by information from CBP or USCIS systems and prioritizes the records according to enforcement priority. The prioritization is also a manual process, but the assessment says it will later become automated. US-VISIT then transfers the final list of potential overstays to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where it is uploaded into a system known as LeadTrac.

ICE also sends the list to the National Counterterrorism Center (a part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) which reviews the records against databases of terrorism information, the assessment says.

The NCTC retains records for which there is no match for 180 days, the assessment adds. CBP keeps lead data for 90 days, while USCIS archives emailed US-VISIT data it extracts but doesn't retain the records generated by cross-checking the extract against its CLAIMS 3 database.

US-VISIT and ICE retain records of leads generated through information sharing for 75 years.

UPDATE 1/8/2011: This article has been updated to reflect a DHS official's Sept. 13, 2011 testimony before Congress regarding the department's screening of the US-VISIT backlog for public safety and national security threats.

For more:
- download the privacy impact assessment for the One DHS Overstay Vetting Pilot (.pdf)

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