DHS asks allies to do more screening on travelers to U.S.

The Trump administration on Friday tweaked the rules on more than three dozen countries whose citizens don’t have to obtain a visa to visit the U.S., demanding they do more to screen people within their own borders before they can travel to America.

While some lawmakers have called for suspending or limiting the Visa Waiver Program in light of the danger from foreign jihadists, the administration said it considers the program a net positive. But it said the new rules should provide more assurances that people traveling from those countries have been vetted.

The new rules require the 38 countries that are part of the program to certify they are screening their own travelers against U.S. counterterrorism databases, monitoring their own internal safety threats and doing more to discourage their citizens from overstaying their visit period in the U.S.

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Four countries that already have a 2 percent overstay rate will be asked to launch a public relations campaign to try to get people to return on time, Homeland Security officials said.

“We’ve been looking at different ways to ensure the VWP has the appropriate security requirements in place to make sure terrorists, criminals and other actors can’t exploit the program,” a senior administration official said in briefing reporters.

The visa waiver program allows visitors from some of the country’s top allies to travel to the U.S. without having to go through the full process of obtaining a visa. Travelers are still vetted and countries that participate must agree to more stringent information-sharing, and the U.S. must have confidence in those other countries’ processes.

Friday’s changes appear aimed at bolstering American officials’ confidence in those other countries.

Many of the 38 countries already do the sort of screening and vetting against U.S. databases that the new rules require, officials said. Four of the 38, however, have overstay rates above 2 percent.

Those countries — Greece, Hungary, Portugal and San Marino — will have to come up with public relations campaigns to convince their citizens not to overstay.

Homeland Security is also calling for Congress to write into law changes made by executive action in previous administrations that require them to allow U.S. air marshals to patrol flights to the U.S., as well as to report their own foreign terrorist information to an international body such as Interpol.