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posals to management in 1986, 1995, and 1997. No action was taken on them.
In 1997, a National Security Unit was set up to handle alerts, track potential
terrorist cases for possible immigration enforcement action, and work with the
rest of the Justice Department. It focused on the FBI's priorities of Hezbollah
and Hamas, and began to examine how immigration laws could be brought to
bear on terrorism. For instance, it sought unsuccessfully to require that CIA
security checks be completed before naturalization applications were
approved.

Policy questions, such as whether resident alien status should be

revoked upon the person's conviction of a terrorist crime, were not addressed.

Congress, with the support of the Clinton administration, doubled the num-

ber of Border Patrol agents required along the border with Mexico to one
agent every quarter mile by 1999. It rejected efforts to bring additional
resources to bear in the north.The border with Canada had one agent for every
13.25 miles. Despite examples of terrorists entering from Canada, awareness of
terrorist activity in Canada and its more lenient immigration laws, and an
inspector general's report recommending that the Border Patrol develop a
northern border strategy, the only positive step was that the number of Border
Patrol agents was not cut any further.

Inspectors at the ports of entry were not asked to focus on terrorists. Inspec-

tors told us they were not even aware that when they checked the names of
incoming passengers against the automated watchlist, they were checking in
part for terrorists. In general, border inspectors also did not have the informa-
tion they needed to make fact-based determinations of admissibility.The INS
initiated but failed to bring to completion two efforts that would have pro-
vided inspectors with information relevant to counterterrorism--a proposed
system to track foreign student visa compliance and a program to establish a way
of tracking travelers' entry to and exit from the United States.

In 1996, a new law enabled the INS to enter into agreements with state and

local law enforcement agencies through which the INS provided training and
the local agencies exercised immigration enforcement authority. Terrorist
watchlists were not available to them. Mayors in cities with large immigrant
populations sometimes imposed limits on city employee cooperation with fed-
eral immigration agents. A large population lives outside the legal framework.
Fraudulent documents could be easily obtained. Congress kept the number of
INS agents static in the face of the overwhelming problem.

The chief vehicle for INS and for state and local participation in law

enforcement was the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), first tried out in New
York City in 1980 in response to a spate of incidents involving domestic ter-
rorist organizations.This task force was managed by the New York Field Office
of the FBI, and its existence provided an opportunity to exchange information
and, as happened after the first World Trade Center bombing, to enlist local offi-
cers, as well as other agency representatives, as partners in the FBI investiga-
tion.The FBI expanded the number of JTTFs throughout the 1990s, and by

COUNTERTERRORISM EVOLVES

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