Eight Suspected Terrorists Highlight Biden’s Recklessness on Vetting Illegal Aliens Andrew McCarthy
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.
In any rational framework of border security, it should be up to the alien — the illegal alien who tries to enter in violation of our laws — to prove that he or she is not a threat. The burden cannot be on the government, bereft of background data on the aliens — indeed, of any means of obtaining reliable data — to determine whether an alien seeking entry is a terrorist, a criminal, or a person likely to become a ward of the state.
American statutory law mandates that any alien seeking entry who doesn’t have a legal right to be in the United States “shall be detained” until his case is adjudicated. That law should be enforced, and we shouldn’t even be talking about release. But since the Biden administration won’t enforce the law and insists on not just talking about release but actually releasing millions of illegal aliens into our country, it is necessary to demand basic security: If our government does not have and/or cannot even access adequate background information to assess whether a person seeking entry is a threat, then that person must be turned away or detained.
The fact that we are letting hordes of such people enter, on the rationalization that we don’t have data so we can’t prove the person is dangerous, is insane.
Earlier this year, I related that (a) as Biden enriches and appeases Iran, Iran remains the world’s leading state-sponsor of anti-American terrorism; and (b) Iran has an operational alliance with Venezuela, which gives it a toehold in the West and golden opportunities to infiltrate jihadist cells into our country. Yet,
Biden is facilitating illegal immigration from Venezuela (among other South and Central American countries) through a lawless visa scheme. In a post earlier today, I drew on a report by Andrew Arthur (of the Center for Immigration Studies) about the staggering number of illegal immigrants (371,000) who entered the country last month. Arthur relates that, despite the fact that Biden reserves for Venezuela a healthy share of the annual (illegal) parole grants from his CHNV program (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela), tens of thousands of additional aliens from those countries are showing up illegally every month. Last month, of 61,500 such illegal aliens, 47,000 were from Venezuela. That’s bad . . . but not as bad as the 51,833 from Venezuela in September.
The mind reels. Does any rational person think Iran is not capitalizing on this scheme?
That’s just a snapshot from January. Things continue to deteriorate. We are letting in millions of people we have no way of vetting. Do we really think the problem is limited to the eight Tajiks we now happen to know about?
Just a few days before the eight Tajiks who should never have been admitted by the government were apprehended by the government, FBI director Christopher Wray told a Senate subcommittee:
[W]e have seen over the last five to six years an increase in the number of known or suspected terrorists, in other words, watch-listed subjects attempting to cross the border. And that is of concern. . . . The bigger problem, in my view, is twofold. One, individuals who, when they come in, are either armed with fake documents or snuck in some way or – or, and this is very important, individuals for whom there’s not enough derogatory information in the intelligence community to watch list them yet….
As we pull out of Afghanistan, for example, you get less and less information about whether somebody from Afghanistan is actually a threat. And so some of the cases that I have seen that concern me are situations where somebody comes into the United States – it’s not because there was a breakdown between CBP and the TSC [Homeland Security’s Threat Screening Center]. It’s because they weren’t watch-listed at the time. But in hindsight, they should have been watch-listed because information was later developed that says, this person is a problem. [Emphasis added.]
As is often the case, Wray is highlighting policy recklessness without pointing out that it’s Biden administration policy recklessness. But let’s connect the dots he won’t, at least not publicly: If we don’t have enough information about an illegal alien at the time of entry to make a discriminating appraisal of whether the alien may pose a threat to the United States, on what planet is it a responsible security decision to let that person into the United States?
Biden has returned us to September 10. That’s not apt to end well.
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