Steve Quayle News Alerts

February 6, 2003
By Paul Sperry, © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com

WASHINGTON -- Undocumented Chinese nationals claiming asylum are flocking in record numbers to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, the nation's busiest, raising national security concerns, U.S. intelligence and immigration officials say.

O'Hare has become a popular entry point for Chinese immigrant smugglers since early last spring, when the INS district director in Los Angeles began cracking down on undocumented Chinese nationals making false asylum claims at Los Angeles International Airport.

"There was almost an immediate surge here after LAX starting keeping them in custody," rather than releasing them on recognizance before deportation or asylum hearings, as was the customary practice, an INS inspections supervisor at O'Hare told WorldNetDaily.

"They like Chicago O'Hare," he explained, "because they know they're going to be released by our detention folks downtown after two weeks tops."

He says INS asylum officers last year handled more than 1,000 undocumented Chinese aliens trying to enter the country through O'Hare, an unprecedented surge.

"We're letting these people in even though we really have no idea who they are," the supervisor warned, asking for anonymity. "It's almost impossible to get any information or any kind of background checks from our embassy in Beijing."

Most are males ranging in age from 15 to 35. Though some have legitimate asylum needs, many have ties to the Chinese mafia and Chinese military, say U.S. intelligence officials and other authorities investigating Chinese smuggling rings in Chicago.

"Many of them are serious criminals financed by the Chinese mafia syndicates, and some are agents sponsored by the military" to spy on the U.S., a federal counterintelligence official said in a phone interview.

Officials say they've been coached by smugglers to offer bogus persecution claims. "They even have classes and books on Christianity and the Falun Gong sect that instruct these people on how to fool the asylum officer into getting asylum and eventually resident status," the counterintelligence official said. Beijing police have cracked down on Falun Gong followers.

If they claim a "credible fear" of communist persecution for their religious beliefs, the asylum officer must admit them. But some of their claims are "wild," said the INS supervisor at O'Hare.

"Many claiming Falun Gong persecution have no idea what Falun Gong is," he said. "Some are even claiming that the government is after them because their distant relatives practice Falun Gong."

"You almost have to laugh at some of these excuses," the supervisor said. "They definitely stretch the limits of credible fear."

Beijing's one-child law is also commonly used as an excuse, he says.

"We're getting a lot of men who say their wife is pregnant with their second child," and that the government will force their wife to have an abortion if they stay in China, he said. "But when we ask where their wife is, they say she's back in China."

O'Hare inspectors are also seeing a rise in forged documents from Chinese aliens, and some forgeries are fairly sophisticated.

WorldNetDaily has learned that in September, for instance, INS inspectors at the Chicago hub caught a Chinese woman using a U.S. diplomatic passport that was totally photo substituted. "Some of the fibers were disturbed" on the passport, which was sent to a forgery lab for inspection, the supervisor said. INS investigators have been working with U.S. officials in Beijing to see how she got the passport.

"Only employees of the Department of State and their children carry those black diplomatic passports, which just get right through" inspections, the INS official said. "It's rare to see a forgery, because those things are guarded pretty tight. But she got a hold of one somehow."

An INS supervisor at LAX, meantime, says that Thomas Schiltgen, INS district director in Los Angeles, has dramatically slowed Chinese alien smuggling there by detaining undocumented Chinese claiming asylum.

"Before, when a Chinese alien arrived with no documents at all, we would take a statement, mostly lies, and then have them transported to our lockup facility in San Pedro awaiting an asylum hearing. A lawyer would come along a day or two later and post bond and these people would be allowed to leave the facility on their own and would be given a date for their hearing. Nine out of 10 would take off and never return for their hearing, and we would have no idea where they are or what they are doing," said Terry Hamilton, a senior INS inspections officer in a WorldNetDaily interview. "But then Mr. Schiltgen finally decided they would all remain in custody pending their hearing, and no bond or bail would be allowed."

"These hearing dates can take up to six to eight months because of the backlog, so we are now keeping all these people in custody for that long," Hamilton added. "That's why they have moved their operation to Chicago," where the INS district still allows immigration lawyers to post bond for their clients.

Only, their clients seldom show up for their hearings. For example, one day last fall the INS detention facility in downtown Chicago released some 15 undocumented Chinese aliens, the O'Hare INS supervisor noted. They were supposed to stay in the area to report to their asylum hearing before an immigration judge.

Instead, they were herded into a truck by Chinese smugglers waiting right outside the detention center, and taken back to the airport, where they boarded a domestic flight bound for New York -- "and from there they were redistributed around the country," he said.

http://worldnetdaily.com/news/printer-friendly.asp?ARTICLE_ID=30903