The discovery of the old social media posts has exposed a significant – and perhaps inevitable – shortcoming in how foreigners are screened when they enter the United States, particularly as people everywhere disclose more about themselves online. In a brief telephone interview, her sister Fehda Malik said that Tashfeen was not an extremist, and she rejected the allegations against her sister. He didn’t specify what changes were going to be made. They believe that was when she was radicalised.
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“I am the one who spent most of the time with my sister”, she said.
A lot of the focus is on rooting out union fraud. A couple must prove they have physically seen each other within the past two years, unless meeting in person would violate “strict and long-established customs” or cause an “extreme hardship”. “On a case-by-case basis, consular officers and our interagency partners may examine any publicly available information, such as social media, about the applicant, including for evidence of the bona fides of the relationship”.
The State and Homeland Security departments have said all procedures were carefully followed during the process in the granting of Malik’s K-1 visa.
Malik was born in Pakistan and immigrated to the USA from Saudi Arabia in 2014 on a visa for men and women whose wedding is imminent.
In the social media era, it seems impossible that something like a supportive tweet or post would go unnoticed during the vetting process. “She said that she supported it. And she said she wanted to be a part of it”, The New York Times newspaper reported.
Had the authorities found the posts years ago, they might have kept her out of the country.
Malik was vetted by three separate American agencies before entering the country. First, her name was assessed by Homeland Security against law enforcement and national security databases.
Malik later passed two other checks against security databases before her visa was OK’d, the two senior State Department officials said. They cautioned that such searches, particularly one in a bustling public park, tend to dredge up debris from many sources, and that investigators still have to determine the value of what was found.
“Well, clearly, we now know that these individuals were radicalized way before, probably as early as 2010 for him and 2012 for her”, said Sen. “She knew what was right and what was wrong”, Fehda Malik said. Richard Burr, R-North Carolina, and chairman of the Intelligence Committee in an interivew with CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. It could be factual questions not necessarily derogatory about the application.
Tashfeen faced three extensive national security and criminal background screenings. “That includes an immigrant visa interview, it includes facial recognition screening, it includes interagency counterterrorism screening, it included a review by the visa security unit of immigration and customs enforcement, which as a detachment in Islamabad in our embassy there and it included the full biometric fingerprint checks and in all cases, the results of those checks were clear”.
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Immigration officials doing background checks of people who want to settle in the United States have not been routinely reviewing social media, the report added.
