Tagged: Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

The department of Homeland Security is changing the way border agents process those people entering the country on student visas.

"Effective immediately," the AP reports, agents will have to "verify that every international student who arrives in the U.S. has a valid student visa."

The AP adds:

Some employers around the nation have been using E-Verify to check the immigration status of employees for years. Operated by the Department of Homeland Security, the online system is designed to make it harder to hire unauthorized workers — and harder for those workers to find jobs.

While participation in the program has been voluntary since 1996, the immigration bill now in the Senate would make E-Verify mandatory.

U.S. security officials have been warning for years that one of their biggest challenges is detecting homegrown terrorists — extremists who grow up in America, or have lived here for years, know the customs, speak the language, blend in easily and can fly below the radar of law enforcement.

As details of Boston bombing suspects emerge, reports point to two young men of Chechen origin who had been in the U.S. for up to a decade and were seemingly fully integrated into American society.