US clears Iroquois lacrosse team to go to UK, but team still has no visas, can’t board plane

US clears Iroquois lacrosse team for travel to UK

NEW YORK — The U.S. government on Wednesday agreed to let a Native American lacrosse team travel to England for a tournament under Iroquois Confederacy passports, but their travel plans were still on hold because they lacked visas from Britain and because some players needed clearance from Canada.

The 23-member Iroquois team was unlikely to make a Wednesday afternoon flight from Kennedy Airport or Thursday’s first game of the Lacrosse World Championships in Manchester, England, said Oren Lyons, the team chairman and a chief of the Onondaga Nation. Nine team members are Canadian-born and still need Canadian waivers, and talks continued with British officials over visa requirements, team officials said.

“This has not been the best preparation for a world tournament,” Lyons said.

The team’s bus pulled up to an international terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport Wednesday afternoon, then pulled away shortly afterward; the team never got off.

The players regard U.S. government-issued documents as an attack on their identity, but U.S. officials have said their Iroquois documents did not meet new, stricter passport standards.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton determined that the team members born within U.S. borders did not need U.S. passports to make the trip and granted the players a “one-time-only waiver” to travel on their Iroquois passports, said State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley.

Asked why the department had dropped its opposition, he said, “There was flexibility there to grant this kind of one-time waiver given the unique circumstances of this particular trip.”

But it was unclear if the British government would award visas.

“These passports are not internationally recognized as valid air travel documents,” a British Home Office spokesman said Wednesday evening on condition of anonymity, in line with government policy. Anyone without a valid passport would not be granted a visa, he said.

Canadian foreign affairs spokesman Alain Cacchione said privacy laws prevented him from giving details on the case. He did say, however, that “the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade of Canada is aware of the situation in the USA. We are ready to provide consular assistance to all Canadian citizens.”

Federation of International Lacrosse spokesman Ron Balls said in a statement on the championship website Wednesday that the Iroquois team would forfeit the opening game against England if it doesn’t arrive on time. But Tonya Gonnella Frichner, a member of the Onondaga Nation who works with the team, said that would go against the rules of the federation and she believed the game would be rescheduled.

The Iroquois Confederacy oversees land that stretches from upstate New York into Ontario, Canada.

The Iroquois, known to members as the Haudenosaunee, helped invent lacrosse, perhaps as early as 1,000 years ago. Their participation in the once-every-four-year world championship tournament is a rare example of international recognition of their sovereignty.

Crowley stressed Wednesday that the waiver was a one-time event and that the team would need U.S. passports for future overseas travel.

For U.S. authorities, the issue is a matter of border security rather than Iroquois sovereignty.

“For other countries, including the United States, that is not a travel document that is on par with a U.S. passport,” Crowley said of the Iroquois documents. He noted that the Iroquois have had similar problems with their passports in foreign countries before.

“The best way to open doors around the world is to obtain a U.S. passport,” he said.

The U.S. and other nations have a history of recognizing Iroquois Confederacy passports, but the documents lack new security features now required for border crossings because of post-Sept. 11 crackdowns on document fraud and illegal immigration.

New U.S. passports, for example, contain embedded radio-frequency identification chips, similar to the ones inside highway toll transponders. The Iroquois documents look similar to U.S. passports but are emblazoned with a Haudenosaunee insignia featuring a tree and animal emblems. The simple blue booklet is made with thinner paper than U.S. passports, has no high-tech chips and some information is handwritten.

At least four tribes, including the Kootenai, of Idaho; the Pasqua Yaqui, of Arizona; the Tohono O’odham Nation, of Arizona and Mexico; and the Seneca, of New York, have been working with federal officials to develop ID cards that meet new security guidelines, but would be good only for arrivals in the U.S. by land or sea, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Frichner, who also is the North American Regional Representative to the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, said the Iroquois have almost completed a transition to higher security passports. The process has cost the six-nation confederacy more than $1.5 million, she said.

Native Americans are not the only ones that have been asked to beef up travel document security features in recent years.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. has also tightened up identification rules for foreign travelers from close U.S. allies like France, Germany and the United Kingdom. A growing number of visitors from those countries who wish to travel to the U.S. without a visa must now present passports containing digital photographs and embedded electronic information.

The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative also began requiring most U.S. citizens to present their passports when re-entering the country from Canada or Mexico. Previously, travelers needed only to show a driver’s license and orally declare their citizenship.

Associated Press writers Verena Dobnik in New York, Matthew Lee in Washington and Sylvia Hui in London contributed to this report.