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UCLA officials are confident in the benefits of a recently implemented system to track international students, though some government agents say the system is not being thoroughly used by customs officials.

The Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, which is run by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, is used to keep track of students entering the United States with a student visa.

Jill Drury, national director of the SEVIS program, said customs officials – whom students encounter when they enter the country – currently do not have access to SEVIS.

“The information is available via other systems, which inspectors do have access to,” Drury said.

Customs officials are responsible for checking records of students entering the country and deciding which ones need further background checks.

A student designated as needing further checks would then be referred to a second line of customs agents.

The second line of agents are the ones who deal directly with SEVIS and have ready access to the system.

Critics of SEVIS say by making educational institutions comply with the national SEVIS system schools are forced to waste manpower and funds on something of relatively little value.

“We are a small university and so we had to scratch and scrape to find creative solutions to implement SEVIS at our school, since we were mandated by law to do so by August,” said Brian Mylrea, director of international students affairs at Tennessee Technological University.

SEVIS became uniform throughout all higher education institutions in August 2003.

“We would hope that very soon in the future all the officers at the port of entry would have access to SEVIS. It would make the system more efficient,” Mylrea said.

Drury said currently the Department of Homeland Security is working toward providing SEVIS directly to the first line of custom officials, but there is no time frame for full system implementation.

The system is being fully supported at the Office of International Students and Scholars at UCLA, where it is most heavily used on campus.

Rahimah Herd, a fourth-year English student and an assistant in the international center, said she believes in the benefits of SEVIS, not only for the government but for UCLA, as well.

“I think it has much more of an advantage (and is) so much more convenient,” Herd said of the SEVIS system.

Lawrence Gower, director of the Office of International Students and Scholars, also praised the new system when comparing it to the pre-2003 system at UCLA, which like at many campuses nationwide, consisted of paper documentation.

“It’s like a horse and buggy compared to a jet,” Gower said of the new computerized tracking.

“The SEVIS system is much more efficient. Reporting is instantaneous. It is vast (and) much more comprehensive,” he said.

Hannah Bar-Giora, director of the international students program at Philadelphia University, said she

doesn’t believe the SEVIS system being unavailable to custom officials would make the system any less efficient.

“I don’t really think it’s a horrible thing. It might slow things up a little if they had to do everything through SEVIS,” Bar-Giora said.

“First-line custom officials are experienced enough to see if there is a problem, and, if there is, it can go on to further scrutiny,” she added.

Lauren Mack, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the first line of officials is very good at determining which students need further attention, and they are very competent at picking up anything suspicious such as false documentation.

“It would be very difficult in today’s world to sneak into the United States with a false I-20,” Mack said, referring to documents international students need to receive visas to the United States.

Though currently federally funded, Congress has mandated for the SEVIS program to be funded through system fees, which would be paid by the international students.

The new fee is expected to increase filing costs for a student by about $100 and will go into effect some time this year.