The US Homeland Security Department was working on reforms to the student visa system even before revelations that a friend of the surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect re-entered the country with an invalid visa, the government said on Friday.
Homeland Security (DHS) has been working to reform the system for a number of months, a department official said. The reform would ensure that US Customs and Border Patrol officials receive real-time updates on all relevant student visa information.
Azamat Tazhayakov, a friend of bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, re-entered the United States on January 20 with a visa that was no longer valid because he had stopped attending university classes.
At the time of his re-entry, the Customs and Border Patrol had not been notified that he had left school on January 4. There was no information on that date suggesting he posed a national security or public safety threat, the department said.
Tazhayakov, a Kazakh national, had been a student and at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth together with Tsarnaev. The 19-year-old was among three friends arrested this week and charged with helping remove evidence from Tsarnaev’s dorm room or lying about their actions to federal authorities.
Under current student visa rules, if the visa is terminated based on failure to enrol or dismissal from a school, students generally have 30 days to normalize their status. If an individual has no criminal history, they typically do not present a priority security case if ultimately they are unable to normalize their status with the university.
Foreign students living in the US must obtain a visa, known as an F-1, to attend college. The government issued 385,000 of them in 2010, according to the State Department.