On July 6th, 2021, 24-year-old Khaled Awad, a student visa holder and chemical engineering student from Egypt, savagely attacked Rabbi Shlomo Noginski, stabbing the Rabbi eight times outside a Jewish day school in Boston. Suffolk County ADA Margaret Hegarty stated in court that Awad arrived in the U.S. with "biased views" against Jews, Christians, and American culture - the motive of Awad's terrorist attack is presumed to be solely anti-Semitic.
At the time, Fox News revealed an important aspect of the story conveniently left out of most major news reports, the 24-year-old jihadi was in the United States illegally on an expired student visa ("F-1") granted in 2019. Worse yet, Awad had maintained his F1 visa despite being implicated in an earlier anti-Semitic attack less than a year after obtaining it, that time attacking his Jewish roommate at the University of Florida.
Less than a week after the attack in Boston, the Biden Department of Homeland Security withdrew a September 2020 regulation that would have subjected F-1 student visa holders and J-1 research-exchange visa holders to badly needed oversight and security vetting.
Proposed Rule 2020-20845, cited a recent outbreak of Chinese espionage by "researchers" [often Chinese military officials] granted cultural exchange visas (J-1), and the threat of violent Islamic terrorism as reasons for requiring certain student visa holders to renew them every two to four years and to check that they are still in good standing at universities.
The most valuable part of the proposed process would have required DHS agents to conduct in-person interviews with renewal applicants before visa renewals could be granted. In addition, the agents would be required to collect biometric information, confirm progress at academic institutions, and double-check that the originally claimed purposes for the visa remain valid.
Other than making sure student or research visa holders uphold their end of the legal agreement they made to obtain the visa - the proposed process would have also provided the opportunity for suspicious activity referrals to the FBI, and represented the first real government oversight of a visa program that up until that point had open-ended, self-reporting style enforcement that allowed for indefinite years of visa renewals.
Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, just as the approval process for Proposed Rule 2020-20845 appeared to be coming to an end - the Biden Administration canceled the whole thing. Another disastrous act in line with the Administration's ambitions to admit as many foreign nationals as possible into the U.S., regardless of existing law, public opinion, or the national interest.
In its official excuse as to why it canceled the potentially life-saving program, the Biden Administration could do no better than place the blame on negative comments of the proposed rule on the Federal Register's website.
Keep in mind that the majority of such comments most likely came from the affected visa holders, university administrators, and anyone else who had built a profitable empire on exploiting student and exchange visas. A vast majority of the negative comments consisted of complaints that the new rule "would significantly burden" visa holders and make it easier for the U.S. to deny them "immigration benefits."
Todd Bensman, Senior National Security Fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies, sums up the Administration's explanation perfectly in a recent op-ed:
That’s weak soup...
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Bensman goes on to highlight other similar examples that unfolded in just the last two decades, involving foreign radicals being allowed to enter the country on student visas who then plot atrocious acts of terror.
One story involved a Moroccan F-1 visa holder who was arrested and charged with terrorism and immigration fraud after his plot to fly bombs via drone into Harvard University was exposed. Another involved a Bangladeshi F-1 visa holder who planned to detonate a 1,000-pound bomb at the N.Y. Federal Reserve Bank. Bensman also notes that one of the September 11th hijackers was an illegal student visa overstay.
However, the proposed oversight was not just created to combat the growing trend of Islamic terror across the globe; Proposed Rule 2020-20845 was also directly intended to combat another ever-increasing national security threat in the United States, Chicom spies.
For just under two years, the FBI has quietly been releasing reports on dozens of Chinese communist party spies who successfully posed as graduate students on F-1 visas and research scholars on J-1 visas to siphon America's medical and scientific advancements as well as critical national defense knowledge from the nation's top academic institutions and laboratories.
Proposed Rule 2020-20845 explained its own necessity when it was published:
These changes would ensure that the Department has an effective mechanism to periodically and directly assess whether these non-immigrants [visa holders] are complying with the conditions of their classifications and U.S. immigration laws, and to obtain timely and accurate information about the activities they have engaged in and plan to engage in during their temporary stay in the United States.
"What could be so terrible in any of that?" Bensman concludes.
For Bensman's complete op-ed, please click here.
For a recent update on the arrest of 5 Chinese spies, please click here.
