Enhancing Overseas Traveler Vetting Act

Floor Speech

I rise in support of H.R. 4403, the Enhancing Overseas Traveler Vetting Act.

I want to associate myself with the comments of our committee chair, particularly his praise for the hard work of Mr. Hurd and the involvement of Chairman McCaul of the Homeland Security Committee.

I am a cosponsor of this legislation, and I supported it in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which considered the bill on February 24, and voted it out by voice unanimously, with no opposition. It is also my understanding that the bill also passed unanimously in the Committee on Homeland Security.

As the chairman of our committee explained, this legislation authorizes the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to develop open-source versions of software that vets travelers against terrorist watch lists and law enforcement databases. Once the software is developed, we will be able to share it with our allies and multilateral organizations involved in police work, such as INTERPOL. That means that we will have better software in the hands of worldwide law enforcement sooner and it will be interoperable.

As things stand now, we do not have a comprehensive global database for identifying and tracking terrorists. As the bipartisan Task Force on Combating Terrorist and Foreign Fighter Travel, which was established by Chairman McCaul and the Committee on Homeland Security, highlighted in its September 2015 report, ``countries, including the United States, rely on a patchwork system for swapping extremist identities, increasing the odds foreign fighters will slip through the cracks.''

The Paris and Brussels terrorist attacks demonstrate the need for a global system. Since those tragedies, there has been finger pointing about missed intelligence and criticism over the lack of information sharing across borders.

Just in February, Europol warned that more than 5,000 Europeans with European passports had traveled to ISIS and Syria to become ISIS fighters. In late March, European security officials told the Associated Press that the Islamic State group had trained at least 400 attackers and sent them to Europe to carry out specific attacks.

Of course, we have a visa waiver relationship with most of Europe, and that means these European passport holders will be able to visit the United States without special vetting by our officials. There is an exception to that for those European passports that have been stamped indicating they visited Syria or Iraq.

This should not give us a whole lot of false security because, typically, foreign fighters who want to join ISIS travel to Turkey, where their passport is stamped with a Turkish stamp and then they sneak into ISIS-controlled areas. ISIS does not stamp their passport entry into the Islamic State, so the passports of these Europeans that have gone to fight for ISIS in Iraq and Syria do not bear a Syrian or Iraqi stamp.

In addition, if, for some reason, they did bear such a stamp, any European can simply go and ask for a replacement passport and, in most cases, there will be no record available to the United States that this person had ever visited Syria or Iraq.

So we need a system that gives us the best possible opportunity to identify foreign fighters, but especially those who hold European passports.

If we are going to fight and prevent global terrorism in tandem with other countries, the United States and our allies must be on the same page when it comes to vetting travelers and tracking would-be terrorists. This legislation helps us do just that.

I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 4403.

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Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, seeing as I have no additional speakers, I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 4403, the Enhancing Overseas Traveler Vetting Act.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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