About Those 42 Terrorists Who Crossed the American Southern Border
4/27/2022 - Todd Bensman Townhall.com
AUSTIN, Texas – In 2018, when President Donald Trump said Islamic terrorist suspects were crossing America’s southern border among Central American caravans, just about everyone with a megaphone called him a fear-mongering, anti-immigrant liar.
But the sound of silence is overwhelming about two pieces of information just out of Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security regarding this putatively fake national security threat of jihadist border infiltration. These demand at least some discussion in context before they are allowed to pass quietly into the news cycle night – or until a terrorist finally attacks. As the author who wrote the only book about this threat issue, America’s Covert Border War, the Untold Story of the Nation’s Battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration, I volunteer for duty.
One piece of information came by way of a Fox News Freedom of Information Act request to DHS. The agency’s return said that between January 20 and December 27, 2021, Border Patrol encountered 23 border-crossing migrants caught in the brush who matched the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB), the terror watch list. Serious, vetted intelligence information is necessary nowadays for anyone to get nominated and approved to be on the TSDB.
A second piece of information came by a separate information request from Texas Congressman Chip Roy (R-Texas). DHS reported back that between Inauguration Day and December 31, 2021 federal authorities caught 42 watch-listed immigrants between ports of entry and in the brush between ports of entry. The overlap between the Roy and Fox News information is not clear. It’s also not clear whether the ports of entry referenced here are on the border or might reference interior international airports. But we do know from what Democrats should regard as an indisputably credible source that as few as 23 and as many as 42 suspected terrorists were encountered at the border last year, and not according to Donald Trump.
First, know this: anyone on the FBI’s terror watch list, for whatever reason they got on it, do not qualify for entry under any circumstance and must be deported. Second, illegal immigration from nations where Islamic terrorist groups operate happens all year every year. This is a steady-state smuggling flow into South America or Central America, where Biden’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection says they enter into the northbound smuggling lanes to the American border.
In normal, non-crisis times, between 3,000 and 4,000 foreign nationals from 25-35 countries of national security concern and flagged as “special interest aliens” reach the American southern border. They are coming from places such as Iran, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Yemen and Syria. I have met and interviewed special interest aliens for years, photographing and videotaping from Panama and Nicaragua to Guatemala and southern Mexico.
The majority are likely economic migrants but this is a higher risk category of migrant, owing in no small part to the fact that 23-42 terrorist watch listed migrants undoubtedly traveled in this flow. It only took 19 al Qaeda hijackers to send America to war in Afghanistan for 20 years.
The 23-42 number for 2021 is fairly in line with my investigative findings for America’s Covert Border War, where I reported that an average of 20 terror-watch-listed illegal immigrants from the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa are apprehended each year either at the southern border or en route to it, in Mexico and beyond.
Thankfully, America has suffered no terror attack from any of them or those who evaded the Border Patrol cordon, although one Somali who crossed through California went on to conduct a 2017 double-vehicle attack in Edmonton, Alberta carrying an ISIS flag. I attribute America’s safety from this back-door threat to counterterrorism programs that require that intelligence officers to conduct enhanced interviews and investigations with special interest alien migrants and recommend what to do with them. Wen they are on the FBI terrorism watch list, the migrants are almost always deported. A second aspect of American counterterrorism programs has American investigators scouring Latin America for travelers and disrupting the unique long-haul smuggling organizations that bring them in.
The system works well when immigration flow over the border is manageable. But it’s not been for 18 months straight. The Border Patrol has been overrun with more than 2.5 million apprehensions since January 2021 – the most since the United States began keeping records in 1960. More worrisome are the 620,000 more border-crossers who simply got away into the American interior. Normal border control management systems have all but collapsed under this historic onslaught.
I have some reason to believe the threat is escalated with all of this going on. Two recent cases suggest that America’s Covert Border War, the namesake of my book, are off the rails.
As I have previously reported, a Lebanese Venezuelan migrant who swam the Rio Grande from Matamoros to Brownsville, Texas, in early December flagged on the FBI terror watch list. Amid the border chaos that month, the FBI still managed to interview him, according to internal documents I have. The agents found “substantial derogatory intelligence” on the Venezuelan and counted him as a “high risk” and a “flight risk,” recommending that he remain in custody. Normally, such individuals are deported. But instead, ICE headquarters ordered the man released for fear that, due to his weight, he might catch Covid. He is now free pursuing an asylum claim in Detroit.
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