Growing unease with DHS Terror Watch Lists
As DHS’s consolidated Terrorism Watch List grows — there are now about 800,000 names on it — criticism by individuals who find themselves on the list for no reason, and by privacy and advocacy groups, grow as well; DHS established Travelers Redress Inquiry Program to allow individuals to have their inclusion on the list examined, but problems persist
There are close to 800,000 names, including aliases, on the U.S. consolidated Terrorism Watch List administered by DHS since December 2003. The names, from twenty-two government agencies, have quadrupled in the past four years, and DHS would not confirm who is or is not on the list. Leonard Boyle, the Director of the Terrorist Screening Center, told a congressional hearing last month that during the past year, 269 foreigners were denied entry into the United States because of the watch list. According to the Justice Department, only about 5 percent of the individuals in the database are U.S. citizens. During the past year, more than eight million cars and drivers were stopped for secondary security screenings while crossing the Canadian or Mexican borders into the United States. This is 14 percent of cars crossing from Canada and 5 percent from Mexico, and the percentage of trucks and buses stopped is significantly higher. By comparison, only 4 percent of airline passengers undergo secondary screenings.
MSNBC reports that There are many organizations in the United States who criticize the list, among them the Arab-American Discrimination Committee (ADC), the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS), and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The American Civil Liberties union (ACLU) is now spearheading a class action lawsuit in federal court with nine plaintiffs, all U.S. citizens, who’ve been stopped while driving home from Canada. In response to numerous complaints about the watch list, DHS earlier this year established the Travelers Redress Inquiry Program (TRIP), an internet-based tool for people to submit complaints about screening or misidentification problems. To date, the department has received nearly 16,000 inquires and has responded to half of them. Kathleen Kraninger, DHS’s director of Screening Coordination, told the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee that DHS’s goal is to clear people who are wrongly listed within thirty days, but currently it is taking, on average, forty-four days to clear the innocent. A bill currently before Congress would require DHS to maintain a comprehensive “cleared” list and distribute it to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies so that once a person is cleared, they are no longer stopped at the border crossings by mistake.
