A preventable terrorist attack

OPINION:

They say history never repeats — except when it does. On Sunday, history repeated itself violently.

An Egyptian illegal alien named Mohamed Soliman, who had overstayed his tourist visa, committed a terrorist attack using Molotov cocktails against Jewish Americans in Boulder, Colorado. Twenty-four years ago, another Egyptian overstayed his tourist visa and committed a much bigger terrorist attack.

His name was Mohamed Atta. He, too, was an Egyptian who overstayed his visa. He entered the United States on a B-1/B-2 temporary visa for business or pleasure, commonly known as a “tourist visa.” He overstayed it with impunity and spent that time planning the attacks as the ringleader of the terrorist cohort. He was at the flight controls of American Airlines Flight 11 when it slammed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Tourist visas are relatively easy to get, and aliens are rarely caught when they overstay their tourist visas. Indeed, other 9/11 terrorists also used tourist visas and overstayed them.

One more thing. Mohamed Atta was pulled over by police not once but twice for traffic violations when he was illegally in the country. The first time was on April 26, 2001, in Broward County, Florida. The second was on July 5, 2001, in Palm Beach County, Florida. On both occasions, had the law enforcement officer known of Atta’s illegal immigration status, the officer could have arrested him and stopped him from piloting one of the four planes on 9/11. It was a missed opportunity that could have saved thousands of lives.

I was counsel to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft at the Department of Justice at the time of the 9/11 attacks. Learning that the terrorists had used tourist visas to enter the United States to commit their attacks and had overstayed their visas with little fear of getting caught, I designed a system to solve the problem. It was called the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS).

Whenever an alien from a high-risk country that was a known home to terrorists, such as Egypt, overstayed a temporary visa, local law enforcement across the country would be alerted so they could arrest the individual if he was encountered in any traffic stop or other law enforcement interaction.

The system was implemented in 2002 via federal regulation. Americans finally had something in place to stop the terrorist threat posed by the ease of getting a temporary visa and overstaying that visa.

Then Barack Obama became president. His Department of Homeland Security canceled NSEERS because, you know, terrorism is not a big enough problem to spend so much effort tracking visa overstays, and it’s unfair to say that terrorism comes from some countries more than others. Of course, we do know that some countries are more likely to produce Islamist terrorists than others. Egypt was one of them in 2001, and it remains so today.

Bottom line: Had NSEERS not been canceled by Mr. Obama, Mohamed Soliman might have been prevented from carrying out his terrorist attack in Boulder on Sunday. Of course, the system requires that the president in power be willing to remove illegal aliens from the country. In Mr. Soliman’s case, the Biden team unbelievably gave him a work permit after learning that he overstayed his tourist visa. He overstayed that as well.

History should never repeat itself, but when shortsighted politicians are in charge, you can bet that it will eventually. It’s time to put the NSEERS program back into effect.

• Kris W. Kobach is the attorney general of Kansas. From 2001 to 2003, he was counsel to the U.S. attorney general. Over the past 20 years, he has litigated multiple major lawsuits concerning illegal immigration.