The TSA keeps getting better and better. In their latest controversy, the administration allowed 25 illegal aliens to train at a Boston flight school. Seventeen of these students have overstayed their authorized period of admission into the country, and the other eight simply entered the country illegally. Under TSA policy, this is not supposed to happen. CNSNews reports on the weakness in the system:
However, a “weakness” in TSA’s Alien Flight Student Program, noted by GAO, is that it does not check for immigration status.“AFSP is not designed to determine whether a foreign flight student entered the country legally; thus, a foreign national can be approved for training through AFSP after entering the country illegally,” stated the GAO in its report. “In March 2010, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigated a Boston-area flight school after local police stopped the flight school owner for a traffic violation and discovered that he was in the country illegally. In response to this incident, ICE launched a broader investigation of the students enrolled at the flight school.”
To be perfectly clear, the issue is that illegal aliens are being approved for flight training by the TSA, not that foreign nationals are being trained. Thousands of foreign nationals have legally received flight training in the United States. It is certainly worth noting that four of the 9/11 hijackers were foreign nationals who had overstayed their authorization. Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama highlighted the absurdity of the GAO’s finding :
"We have cancer patients, Iraq War veterans and Nobel Prize winners all forced to undergo rigorous security checks before getting on an airplane," said Rogers, "and at the same time, ten years after 9/11, there are foreign nationals in the United States trained to fly just like Mohammed Atta and the other 9/11 hijackers did, and not all of them are necessarily getting a security background check."
Does the TSA actually make anybody feel safer flying?
This post was authored by Townhall.com editorial intern Kyle Bonnell.
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