Route J-1

The Office of Private Sector Exchanges in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) oversees the health, safety, and welfare of nearly 300,000 exchange visitors who come to United States each year to enhance mutual understanding between their country and the United States. This is achieved in the way the Designation Office manages the private sector sponsors, how the Program Development and Coordination Office keeps regulations current, the Office of Program Administration investigates exchange visitor incidents and complaints, and how the Office of Exchange Coordination and Compliance (ECC) holds sponsors’ accountable for non-compliance. In 2024, ECC is celebrating 15 years of keeping exchange visitors safe by reviewing and analyzing sponsor operations.

As the Exchange Visitor Program grew in the early 2000s, more resources were required to oversee the increasing numbers of designated sponsors and exchange visitors joining the program. ECA created a Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) team immediately after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, to work closely with the newly-created Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The SEVIS team created and managed an online database system for sponsors to monitor their exchange visitors and maintain records on their whereabouts. In 2008, the Office of Private Sector Exchange was established and the SEVIS team worked closely with the staff to provide information on the size and nature of exchange visitor populations.

ECC was created the next year in 2009 to better maintain the information on exchange students and other international visitors. What was just a few people in the Compliance Unit merged into the newly formed Office of Exchange Coordination and Compliance led by Susan Geary, then-Director of the Student Exchange Visitor Program at DHS. ECC was named “Office of Exchange Coordination and Compliance” for a strategic reason: ECA recognized that a separate office was needed to carry out detailed reviews and analyses of sponsor operations which might result in sanctions. These reviews must be done by staff who do not communicate with sponsors on a day-to-day basis. In addition, close coordination is often required with DHS, the Department of Labor, other federal and state agencies, and state and local law enforcement to fully investigate sponsors.

Under its current Office Director Stephen Hill, ECC has developed into 25 staff members organized into three compliance teams: the SEVIS team, a Law Enforcement Liaison, and two contractors conducting studies and special projects focused on areas and trends to target new compliance reviews. Since ECC’s creation, along with the refinement of standard operating proposals and protocols, there has been a significant decrease in sponsor regulatory non-compliance, particularly in egregious cases. The increase in compliance officer staff has also enabled ECC to increase its compliance reviews in every private sector and academic category.

How does ECC work with sponsors to achieve ideal results? “We take referrals from our sister offices and other sources, investigate non-compliance, and when found, we impose lesser sanctions on sponsors with the goal of helping them improve their programs” Hill said. “If a sponsor’s actions or inactions are egregious enough, ECC can push for greater sanctions to remove the sponsor from the program to protect the health, safety, and welfare of an exchange visitor, the national security, or the integrity of the program. If a compliance review results in no sanctionable violations, we still make recommendations on ways the sponsor could better operate their program based on best practices.”

Hill added, “Health, safety, and welfare are at the core of all our compliance reviews, and thus we either monitor sponsors if lesser sanctions are imposed to ensure improvements in areas like vetting, selecting, housing, monitoring, and responding to exchange visitor inquiries/complaints, or we impose greater sanctions on sponsors that we find to not have the resources or ability to rehabilitate/correct their programs.”

For more information about ECC, please visit:
Compliance Reviews and Sanction Actions – BridgeUSAProgram Sponsors | BridgeUSA (state.gov)

Categories: J-1 Visa