The department of Homeland Security is changing the way border agents process those people entering the country on student visas.
"Effective immediately," the AP reports, agents will have to "verify that every international student who arrives in the U.S. has a valid student visa."
The AP adds:
"The order from a senior official at U.S. Customs and Border Protection, David J. Murphy, was circulated Thursday and came one day after the Obama administration acknowledged that a student from Kazakhstan accused of hiding evidence for one of the Boston bombing suspects was allowed to return to the U.S. in January without a valid student visa.
"The student visa for Azamat Tazhayakov had been terminated when he arrived in New York on Jan. 20. But the border agent in the airport did not have access to the information in the Homeland Security Department's Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, called SEVIS."
Mark has put together a helpful post explaining who's who in the Boston bombing case. Tazhayakov was charged along with two other friends of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
NBC News adds that foreign students who want to study in the United States must get an F-1 visa. "The government issued 385,000 of them and denied 154,000 in 2010, the most recent year for which statistics are available, according to the State Department," NBC reports.
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