The professional presumption that these immigrants pose a greater national security risk than other illegal entrants has remained great enough that federal agencies still tag them for enhanced security screening when encountered as "Special Interest Aliens" or SIAs to help ensure the strangers are not clandestine terrorist agents.
Because the administration has never disclosed that it was knowingly approving SIAs for its land port parole program questions about vetting and purposeful choices to take on additional national security risk within the program have been neither asked nor answered.
SIAs are not regarded as terrorists but, because they arrive as almost complete strangers from nations where avowed anti-U.S. terrorist groups are prevalent, homeland security protocols dating to a 2004 CBP Memorandum and still largely in effect call for SIAs to be tagged and detained until they can go through extra security screening.
According to government policy documents about it, CBP One applicants must pass "Rigorous biometric and biographic national security and public safety screening and vetting." CBP agents and U.S. processors mainly run this information through criminal and domestic national security databases looking for matches to U.S. criminal records, warrants, and terrorism watch lists, those who do this work say.
A DHS source with direct knowledge of government vetting processes for the CBP One land port parole program, who was not authorized to speak or be identified, told CIS that all of the SIAs going through the CBP One appointment and parole at the land ports are run through more databases than all non-SIA applicants - these ones containing classified intelligence information - as a means to detect terrorism problems, the source said.
The administration is knowingly approving SIAs anyway from nations of national security concern whose governments are diplomatically hostile to the United States and would never cooperate, such as Iran, Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan.
Conway told me he was stunned to learn the Biden administration was taking such risks in willingly approving entries of SIAs from Central Asia, a region where anti-American sentiment runs sky high and security vetting must be done hurriedly under the pressure of mass migration crisis.
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