During the recent race riots in Ferguson, Missouri, CNN’s Jake Tapper was walking down a street and filming a segment when someone emerged out of the shadows behind him, holding a banner emblazoned, “ISIS is here.” At that point it was just a threat, or a boast, or both, but on Tuesday Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) said that the Islamic State was doing all it could to make it a reality: “At least ten ISIS fighters have been caught coming across the Mexican border in Texas.”
“There’s nobody talking about it,” Hunter added. “If you really want to protect Americans from ISIS, you secure the southern border. It’s that simple…They caught them at the border, therefore we know that ISIS is coming across the border. If they catch five or ten of them then you know there’s going to be dozens more that did not get caught by the border patrol.”
Indeed. And jihadist exploitation of our southern border is nothing new. In June 2014, Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) foreshadowed Hunter’s announcement when he said: “This jihadist group ISIS and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi have promised direct confrontation with America. He is looking forward to that day and he has said that publicly, we should believe him when he says that. These folks hate everything about the United States.” What’s more, “Of course the way they would come to the United States would be through the porous border with Mexico. The drug cartels will bring people into the country no matter who they are — for money. Everyone in the world knows that the border between the United States and Mexico is completely porous.”
Jihad terrorists and their enablers and accomplices have been entering the U.S. illegally by means of the Mexican border for many years. According to TheBlaze, “Hezbollah members and supporters have entered the U.S. through the southern border as early as 2002, with the case of Salim Boughader Mucharrafille, a Mexican of Lebanese descent. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison by Mexican authorities on charges of organized crime and immigrant smuggling. Mucharrafille had owned a cafe in the border city of Tijuana, near San Diego. In 2002, he was arrested for smuggling 200 people into the U.S., including Hezbollah supporters, according to a 2009 Congressional report.”
And in May 2010, the Department of Homeland Security warned local police along the southern border about a Muslim named Mohamed Ali who was suspected of being a member of the jihad terror group al Shabaab. An official who spoke to CNN about the warning said that it wasn’t clear whether or not Mohamed Ali was trying to enter the country illegally, but it seems unlikely that such an alert would have been sent out to police along the border if that had not been the case. Ali was, in any case, apparently involved in operating a “large-scale smuggling enterprise” that had brought hundreds of Somali Muslims into the U.S. illegally.