The head of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service acknowledged for the first time Tuesday that the agency is to blame for the visa fiasco last week involving two dead Sept. 11 hijackers and said the agency is considering stringent changes that include limiting millions of foreign visitors to 30-day stays.
INS Commissioner James Ziglar told a House immigration subcommittee that the INS– not a private contractor–was at fault for failing to intercept status-change notifications for Mohamed Atta and cohort Marwan Al-Shehhi.
The flight school where the two had trained received those routine documents six months after the men are believed to have piloted airliners into the World Trade Center.
The mistake prompted President Bush to order an investigation and started a furor on Capitol Hill.
“We should have intercepted these I-20s … but we did not,” Ziglar said, referring to the form that acknowledges the applicant’s admission to an accredited school. “We should have known and pulled them out of the system.”
ACS Inc., the Dallas contractor charged with mailing the notices, has said that INS rules required it to keep the original I-20s for six months, a position INS officials disputed last week. But Ziglar said Tuesday that the company did what the INS asked of it.
