The left is slowly waking up to why Joe’s Broken Border policy is bad for America, as seen in a Staten Island brawl when a former Catholic school was converted into a shelter.
Maybe a breaking news story about an ISIS-affiliated smuggler will open their eyes to not just the local inconvenience immigration is causing but also the security concerns.
Long before Biden rolled back all of Trump’s border security features, many of us were concerned that people with ill intent would exploit gaps in our border.
One Kuwaiti even floated a reasonably specific plan for how several pounds of anthrax could be smuggled across that border and released where it could cause chaos in Washington, DC.
That story was one we ran in 2019. There were others like it.
It isn’t as though defending against terror threats is a new idea. But our commitment to that cause is nothing like what it used to be. Now, we’ve got so many people swarming across our border that it’s not hard to slip a few bad actors into a crowd.
Plus, we have the got-away problem where a swarm of ordinary civilians is used as a distraction to keep Border Guards busy in one location. At the same time, the cartels (or other criminals wanting to exploit our borders) bring people and substances across the border that they don’t want border enforcement to intercept.
There has been a security SNAFU so bad that even CNN is reporting it.
The FBI is investigating more than a dozen Uzbek nationals allowed into the US after they sought asylum at the southern border with Mexico earlier this year, a scramble set off when US intelligence officials found that the migrants traveled with the help of a smuggler with ties to ISIS, according to multiple US officials.
While the FBI says no specific ISIS plot has been identified, officials are still working to “identify and assess” all of the individuals who gained entry to the United States, according to a statement from National Security Council spokesman Adrienne Watson. And they are closely scrutinizing a number of the migrants as possible criminal threats, according to two US officials.
Though there is no evidence at this point to justify detaining anyone, the episode was so alarming that an urgent classified intelligence report was circulated to President Joe Biden’s top Cabinet officials in their morning briefing book. For some counterterrorism officials, it shows that the US is deeply vulnerable to the possibility that terrorists could sneak across the southern border by hiding amid the surge of migrants entering the country in search of asylum.
[…]
Earlier this year, a cohort of migrants from Uzbekistan requested asylum and were screened by the Department of Homeland Security, part of a rising number of asylum seekers who have traveled to the US from Central Asia in recent years. There was no information in any of the intelligence community’s databases that raised any red flags and the people were all released into the US pending a court date.It was only later, when the FBI learned about the existence of a human smuggling network helping Uzbek nationals travel to the US – and that this network included at least one individual with connections to ISIS – that national security officials put the pieces together.
FBI agents around the country immediately rushed to try to locate the migrants and investigate their backgrounds. The bureau also worked with Turkish authorities, who arrested the smuggler and other members of his network at the behest of the US, and has subsequently obtained information from him to aid its investigation, US officials said. — CNN
The New York Post added this detail:
But many have not yet been located, and more than 15 that have been tracked down are still under scrutiny as possible criminal threats. — NYPost
The reporting on this story is set up interestingly.
The writers (four of them) seem to be anticipating a potentially harmful outcome but want to frame it in a way to suggest that Biden’s people have done their due diligence in trying to protect American interests in the unlikely event things could go sideways.
On the one hand, the people in question were all screened by Homeland Security and given a future court date like any other alleged asylee currently pouring into America. The article is at great pains to make clear that no people who went through this screening have known terror connections or connections to any known plot.
The smuggler is not suspected of doing this on behalf of anyone from ISIS.
That said, terror links are never good to find on people transgressing your border… especially in a country like America with such a massive target on our back.
The story attempts to thread the needle between acknowledging, on the one hand, the severe security threats this and other similar news stories have represented while downplaying, on the other hand, any real risk represented by the known breaches.
“While the FBI has not identified a specific terrorism plot associated with foreign nationals who recently entered the United States at the southern border, we always work with our field offices across the country, as well as our domestic and international partners, to identify any potential illegal activity or terrorism threats,” the FBI said in a statement to CNN.
But the US has not yet located all of the individuals who traveled as part of the network, according to Watson’s statement. And more than 15 of the migrants tracked down are still under scrutiny by the FBI as possible criminal threats, according to one US official.
Some law enforcement and intelligence officials privately expressed concerns that an unusual increase in the number of migrants from Central Asia, a region that isn’t known to be a major source of refugees, didn’t spark more investigation by US border authorities.
“We continually assess our security architecture to ensure that we are best poised to respond to threats to the homeland,” Watson said in her statement to CNN. “Moreover, we will continue to constantly recalibrate our screening, vetting, and processing of those encountered entering the United States to ensure that we are taking into account the most up-to-date information at our disposal and with an unyielding commitment to protecting Americans and the homeland from the full range of potential threats.” –CNN
Absolute numbers of terror threats encountered at the border have risen sharply in the Biden years — but are explained away as a mere drop in the bucket compared to the total number of people crossing the border overall.
Such a dismissal overlooks three essential facts.
- Terrorism is not the only type of threat that someone crossing our border could bring to American communities. (Ordinary criminality, especially violence and drugs, can be just as harmful.)
- This absolute number of terror threats known to have crossed our border cannot account for the ‘got-aways’ who used a border surge distraction to make a run for the border elsewhere.
- The most obvious point is that it only took 19 people with box cutters to carry out the most deadly terrorist event ever seen on US soil.
If Republicans are smart, they will start hammering on the issue that Democrats found money in the budget to hire more than 80,000 more IRS workers. Still, their latest budget DENIED any new funding for ENFORCEMENT of our Southern Border.
America deserves answers on why that provision was written into the budget.
America deserves to know why Democrats are so hellbent on refusing to enforce their country’s national borders.
Cross-Posted with Clash Daily
