POSTED ON FEBRUARY 9, 2021 BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN IMMIGRATION, JOE BIDEN, TERRORISM
BIDEN’S BORDER CRISIS HEIGHTENS RISK OF TERRORISM
Last night, I discussed how Joe Biden’s immigration policies are creating a crisis at the border. Even the Washington Post admits it.
According to the Post, the new surge at our southern border carries the prospect of death from the Wuhan coronavirus. The Post reports that one area into which illegal immigrants are flooding has more than 100,000 cases of the virus.
The invasion of illegal immigrants carries another deadly prospect — terrorism. Todd Bensman, in his new book America’s Covert Border War, shows that concern about terrorists entering the country illegally at the southern border is justified and, indeed, bipartisan.
The Obama administration was well aware of the threat and took measures to counter it. These measures remained in place during the Trump administration. They have been effective.
However, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to separate terrorists from the mass of people, including those from the Middle East, seeking to cross the border and enter the U.S. illegally but for good faith reasons. In a panel discussion of Bensman’s book today, sponsored by the Center for Immigration Studies, veteran law enforcement officials who have been on the frontlines of this effort compared the task to finding a needle in a haystack. We’ve become good at it, but it’s still a major challenge.
Obviously, the challenge becomes bigger, the larger the haystack is. And that’s the problem (or one of them) with the current border surge that Biden has induced. The surge of so many illegal immigrants makes the haystack much bigger. And the policy of not promptly sending illegal immigrants back across the border increases the likelihood that terrorists will be able to remain in the country.
The Biden administration says it will still deport illegal immigrants who are terrorists. Of course. But its ability to identify which immigrants are terrorists will diminish due to sheer volume of new entrants and the unwillingness to turn them away at the border.
Interviews are the primary method used to determine which “special interest aliens” actually pose a threat. But under Biden’s policies, it will be easier for terrorists among the immigrant population to avoid being interviewed. In addition, it will be difficult for law enforcement agencies, whose resources are already stretched thin, to be as thorough in their vetting.
Even so, it’s not likely that many terrorists will slip into the country as a result of the Biden border surge. But we’ve learned the hard way that it doesn’t take many terrorists to kill lots of Americans.