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HOMELAND SECURITY

Iran-Affiliated Venezuelan Gangs Invited Into the United States by Robert Williams

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21226/venezuelan-gangs-invited-into-us

“Border Patrol zones across Texas, Arizona and California had no agent presence for weeks and months at a time. Those who did not want to be caught could simply walk in. We have no idea who and what entered our country over this time.” — Aaron Heitke, retired chief patrol agent for the San Diego Sector of the U.S. Border Patrol, testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security, September 18, 2024.

“Simultaneously, in San Diego we had an exponential increase in [Special] Interest Aliens (SIAs). These are aliens with significant ties to terrorism…. I was told I could not release any information on this increase in SIA’s or mention any of the arrests. The administration was trying to convince the public that there was no threat at the border.” — Aaron Heitke, testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security, September 18, 2024.

More than half a million Venezuelans have entered the US illegally since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Until Biden became president, few Venezuelans arrived illegally. Only around 4,500 arrived in 2020. After Biden’s inauguration, however, numbers exploded: 50,499 Venezuelans illegally entered in 2021, another 189,520 in 2022 and a whopping 334,914 in 2023.

This means that Venezuelans now rank second in illegal immigration into the US, after Mexicans, who still take the number one spot.

For more than two decades, Venezuela has been a close ally of Iran, and a regional home base for Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in the Middle East. Hezbollah, according to one 2020 Atlantic Council report, helped to “turn Venezuela into a hub for the convergence of transnational organized crime and international terrorism.”

Mayorkas and Wray Refuse to Testify Publicly About National Security Threats Facing US By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/21/mayorkas-and-wray-refuse-to-testify-publicly-about-national-security-threats-facing-us/

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and FBI Director Christopher Wray decided to skip an end-of-year public hearing in the U.S. Senate on Thursday, suggesting that the threats facing the country are so grave they can only be discussed in a classified setting.

Republicans and Democrats alike reacted with outrage.

Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Gary Peters (D-Mich.) strongly rebuked the officials, stating that their refusal to appear is a “shocking departure” from the 15-year tradition of holding the annual hearing on worldwide threats.

Both the FBI and DHS released statements saying the officials had already “testified extensively” in public about the threats facing the U.S. and offered to discuss further threats in a classified briefing.

The FBI has repeatedly demonstrated our commitment to responding to Congressional oversight and being transparent with the American people,” the FBI’s statement said.

“We remain committed to sharing information about the continuously evolving threat environment facing our nation and the extraordinary work the men and women of the FBI are doing — here at home and around the world — to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States. FBI leaders have testified extensively in public settings about the current threat environment and believe the Committee would benefit most from further substantive discussions and additional information that can only be provided in a classified setting.”

Biden-Harris Admin to Waive Visas for Terror State That Harbored 9/11 Mastermind If there’s any country that should require visas, full body scans and bomb-sniffing dogs to enter, it’s Qatar. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-harris-admin-to-waive-visas-for-terror-state-that-harbored-9-11-mastermind/

Qatar harbored 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and tipped him off when we came to get him.

According to the intelligence community, Abdullah bin Khalid al-Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family, its former interior minister and minister of Islamic affairs, was an Al Qaeda sympathizer who had harbored Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. When the FBI arrived in Qatar to arrest him, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks was transported away on a special Qatari government jet with blacked out windows.

Qatar currently harbors Hamas, is an ally of Iran, and enabled the Taliban. It’s a major backer of the Muslim Brotherhood and its Al Jazeera network was a Jihadist video dump for everyone including Osama bin Laden. And then there are the funds that were going to Al-Nusra, an Al Qaeda ally in Syria, out of Qatar.

If there’s any country on the planet where entry to the United States should require visas, full body scans and bomb-sniffing dogs, it’s Qatar.

But instead, the Biden-Harris administration decided to waive visas for one of the worst Islamic terror states in the world.

The United States said Tuesday it will waive visa requirements for citizens of Qatar, making the close Gulf partner the first Arab country to clear the hurdle.

The energy-rich Gulf monarchy cleared the “stringent security requirements” to become the 42nd member of the visa waiver program, the Department of Homeland Security announced.

What did the “stringent security requirements” consist of for a state that is actively harboring Islamic terrorists?

Million dollar checks to the right people?

Iran’s Ayatollahs and Hezbollah assault on the US homeland Yoram Ettinger

http://bit.ly/3WqvRfu

*The Washington DC-based Wilson Center think tank contends that “the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas against Israel, which killed 1,200 people [equal to 41,000 Americans], including 32 U.S. citizens, …could inspire [Islamic] terrorist attacks in the United States and other regions, including Latin America….

*Iran’s Defense Minister Mohammad Reza Ashtiani stated that “Latin American countries are of special significance in Iran’s foreign and defense policy, based on the importance of the very sensitive South American region.” 

*According to Arturo McFields, a Nicaragua diplomat in-exile (The Hill, May 2, 2024), the Ayatollahs’ threat to the US homeland cannot be underestimated. In fact, Iran has redoubled its political, technological and military alliance with Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

*A University of Texas at El Paso study concludes that “[the Hezbollah-Mexican drug cartels nexus] is a time bomb waiting to explode in our homeland…. The threat of an attack by Hezbollah against the US has always been present. It has become much more realistic due to the Hezbollah spread of activity and influence in Latin America [including underground tunnel construction along the US-Mexico border]…. Hezbollah has many pieces in place to conduct an act of terror on U.S. interests…. Venezuela and Chile are hosting Hezbollah, and several more Latin American countries have also been supportive. The proximity of Mexico makes it more deadly. [The Hezbollah-Mexican drug cartels collaboration includes training in the areas of car-bombs, suicide bombing and Improvised Explosive Devices]….”   

Secret Service Director Claims She Couldn’t Stop Assassination Because of Sloped Roof “That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point.” by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/secret-service-director-claims-she-couldnt-stop-assassination-because-of-sloped-roof/

There’s one school of thought that says the federal government is run by evil monsters. Another that it’s run by bureaucrats who have no clue about what their organization actually does. Or how anything works.

And Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle strikes me as having absolutely no clue.

Embattled Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle says she has no plans to resign, even after the stunning revelation that the agency decided not to guard the roof from which Thomas Crooks opened fire on former President Donald Trump because it was too slanted.

“That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof,” she told ABC News in a startling admission.

“And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside,” she told the outlet.

Social media is full of memes of sloped roofs.

Secret Service personnel obviously do deploy, and in that particular setting, did deploy on sloped roofs. This is a dumb excuse by a dumb person told to a dumb media which is eager to accept any excuse that it’s given. But the only question is whether Cheatle knows she’s lying or her ample experience at PepsiCo and sucking up to Jill Biden left her with little time to figure out how anything in the field actually works.

In first five years, 79,000 of DACA recipients admitted to U.S. had arrest records New report found some DACA recipients “may have obtained lawful immigration status, failed to request renewal.”By Bethany Blankley

https://justthenews.com/nation/states/center-square/first-five-years-79000-daca-recipients-admitted-us-had-arrest-records

Within five years of a new program created to prevent deportation of minors brought into the country illegally by their parents, nearly 80,000 were released into the U.S. with arrest records.
 

The majority were between the ages of 19 and 22 when they were arrested, according to the latest available data published by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced he was expanding deportation protections and job opportunities for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program created by executive order by former President Barack Obama in 2012.

According to USCIS, DACA applies to those who were brought into the country before reaching age 16 and were under age 31 as of June 15, 2012, among other criteria.

Tuesday was the 12-year anniversary of DACA, which a federal judge has twice ruled is illegal. Several states, led by Texas, are still fighting to end DACA in a case that is expected to eventually be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, The Center Square reported.

While the majority of DACA supporters argue recipients should be granted citizenship, claiming they contribute to the U.S. economy and are constructive members of society, others argue those with criminal records, at a minimum, should be deported.

According to a USCIS report, in the first five years of DACA being implemented, from June 2012 to October 2019, nearly 80,000 illegal foreign nationals with prior arrest records, including for violent crimes, were granted DACA status.

Eight Suspected Terrorists Highlight Biden’s Recklessness on Vetting Illegal Aliens Andrew McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/eight-suspected-terrorists-highlight-bidens-recklessness-on-vetting-illegal-aliens/

Biden has returned us to September 10. That’s not apt to end well.

Haley’s report on the government’s apprehension of eight Tajiks who are suspected jihadists tied to the Islamic State (ISIS, evidently the Afghan franchise our intel agencies label “ISIS-K,” for “Islamic State – Kohrasan Province”) is important reading. It also illustrates the September 10-level threat environment we’ve returned to, courtesy of President Biden’s heedlessness.

The Biden administration wants our praise for its purported diligence in locking up potential terrorists. We’re not supposed to notice it was the Biden administration that knowingly let these potential terrorists in — and if you think that just eight of them have bored into our country, there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you (as soon as we can clear out the Hamas and Hezbollah flags).

In a jaw-dropping X post, Fox News’s Bill Melugin explains that the government let the Tajiks in because its crack — or better, crackpot — vetting process “flagged nothing.” A U.S. official elaborated, “Sometimes there’s just no information on individuals, it’s quite common where there’s just nothing. You don’t have anything, there’s no criminal convictions, there’s no threat information.”

Understand, untold tens of thousands of illegal aliens are crossing our borders from countries hostile to the United States. It’s not just that the regimes in these countries do not have reliable databases and would not share them with our government if they did. In many of these countries — very much including those with sharia-supremacist cultures that are innately hostile to Western mores — actions that would violate our laws are perfectly legal. That is, the background facts that would make such people threats would never show up in any database from which our government would plead to be given information.

Bear in mind, we are talking here about illegal aliens, not Americans. Illegal aliens do not have an array of constitutional rights to be asserted against our government. The American people created the central government by the Constitution in large part to protect us from threats outside our borders. The Constitution, then, is not supposed to be a weapon to be used by those outside threats against our government, thus leaving us defenseless — that’s a total perversion. Aliens who have no right to be in this country, and whose first act is to violate our laws, do not have a presumption of innocence. It is common sense that they should be presumed hostile.

ICE Arrests Eight Foreign Nationals with Suspected Ties to ISIS By Haley Strack

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ice-arrests-eight-foreign-nationals-with-suspected-ties-to-isis/

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has arrested eight foreign nationals with ties to the terrorist group ISIS-K, an Afghan branch of the Islamic State, over the past week.

“Over the last few days, ICE agents arrested several non-citizens pursuant to immigration authorities,” the Department of Homeland Security and FBI told the New York Post, which first reported the story, in a statement. “The actions were carried out in close coordination with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces. The individuals arrested are detained in ICE custody pending removal proceedings . . . The FBI and DHS will continue working around the clock with our partners to identify, investigate, and disrupt potential threats to national security. ”

ICE arrested the ISIS-K-linked Tajikistani nationals in Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia this week.

FBI director Christopher Wray warned of potential threats from ISIS-K in April, specifically saying that, “increasingly concerning is the potential for a coordinated attack here in the homeland, akin to the ISIS-K attack we saw at the Russia concert hall a couple weeks ago.” ISIS-K carried out an attack at Moscow’s Crocus City Hall in March, which killed 145 people.

Wray has also cautioned that ISIS-affiliated groups have exploited the U.S.’s weak southern border to smuggle terrorists into the country. During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March, Wray said “there is a particular network that, where some of the overseas facilitators of the smuggling network have ISIS ties that we’re very concerned about and that we’ve been spending enormous amount of effort with our partners investigating.”

One U.S. official reportedly confirmed that the eight individuals were not flagged during their screening at the southern Mexico border, but that security officials tracked and later tied the individuals to ISIS-K.

Moscow Massacre: Could it Happen Here? A troubling reflection on our open southern border – and on those who wish us harm. by Cal Thomas

https://www.frontpagemag.com/moscow-massacre-could-it-happen-here/

A mass shooting at a concert hall in Moscow killed more than 130 people. With many others seriously or gravely wounded the number of dead is likely to rise.

The Islamic state released a statement claiming “credit” for the incident. Eleven suspects have been arrested. Early reports suggested the U.S. Embassy in Moscow had advance warning of the attack. The Daily Mail reported White House Strategic Communications Coordinator John Kirby said: “Right now we don’t know to what extent this warning [from the US Embassy in early March] and this attack are related. But we had some concerns about the possibility of a terrorist attack in and around Moscow earlier this month.”

The question that must be asked, as it has been suggested for some time, due to our open southern border, is this: Could it happen here? The answer must be an unequivocal yes. In fact, it has already happened here on Sept. 11, 2001.

Does anyone seriously think America’s enemies would not be encouraged by that previous attack and the Moscow atrocity to conduct a repeat operation in America? With such easy access to the country and with so many fanatical beliefs floating around the world, what would deter them?

The Cato Institute has noted that since 2017,”US Border Patrol has apprehended 342 border crossers who were on the Terrorist Screening Dataset, also known as the terror watchlist. Those numbers have shot up in recent years to 169 in FY2023 and 49 to date this fiscal year. Last month, The Daily Caller reported that Border Patrol apprehended an al Shabaab terrorist and released him into the United States in March 2023 after a mismatch on the watchlist. Later, the government discovered that he was on the watchlist, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested him within 48 hours. The Daily Caller’s headline was “ICE Confirms It Finally Nabbed Terrorist Allowed To Roam Free For Almost A Year.”

The Coming Terrorist Attack on U.S. Soil, Part III Peter Kirsanow

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-coming-terrorist-attack-on-u-s-soil-part-iii/

The disaster at the southern border continues to grow. Border Patrol recorded an astonishing 250,000 encounters with illegal immigrants in December. This figure includes thousands of single, military-age men from China, Russia, and Iran.

The number of individuals on the terror watch list crossing the border has increased 2,500 percent during the Biden administration. In fiscal year 2023 more than 35,000 individuals with criminal records were arrested at the southern border, a tenfold increase since the beginning of Biden’s term (the actual figures are likely far larger since the reported numbers don’t include “gotaways,” conventionally estimated to constitute 50 percent of the total number of individuals entering the country illegally).

NORAD recently reported detecting more than a thousand unmanned-aerial-vehicle incursions along the border per month.

These alarming figures seem to have little impact on DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who regularly appears bored or distracted at congressional hearings concerning the border. His nonchalance is shared by many open-borders advocates, some of whom casually note that none of the individuals on the terror watch list who’ve crossed the border have committed a terrorist act on U.S. soil. Yet. This is what passes for reasoned analysis from open-borders elites.

Perhaps they calculate (or hope) that a terrorist attack won’t occur in their city; terrorists, after all, traditionally prefer high-profile targets. But not always. The terror might be magnified if the attack occurred in a place where people feel relatively safe — a minor-league baseball game in Wichita, a parade in Dubuque, a fair in Salem.

Or perhaps the elites calculate that terrorists entering the country today won’t execute their plans until the next administration. Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) would exclusively blame a Trump administration for anything that occurs on or after 12:01 p.m. on January 20, 2025, even if the attack were planned and executed solely by individuals who crossed the border during the Biden administration.