Sacrificing national security on the altar of open borders.

When I was growing up my mom sagely told me, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

For the past several decades, where actual border security and effective immigration law enforcement are concerned, the political elites of both parties have consistently exclaimed, “No way!”

Rather than devise strategies to effectively enforce our immigration laws, secure our borders and deter massive illegal immigration, our political leaders worked mightily to devise excuses and subterfuges to scam Americans by perpetrating Theft By Deception: The Immigration Con Game.

Politicians from both parties have declared that since we cannot deport all of the illegal aliens in the United States, the best we can do is legalize them to ostensibly “get them out of the shadows.”

That lunacy does not deter illegal immigration but encourages it — in essence, firing the starter’s pistol for aspiring illegal aliens from around the world. That is why a succession of caravans is now heading to the United States.

Indeed, the betrayal of America and Americans by our politicians was the predication for my articles, “Caravan Of ‘Migrants’ – A Crisis Decades In The Making: America is on the edge of forfeiting its sovereignty and security” and “Sanctuary Country – Immigration failures by design.”

I urge you to take the time to read both of those articles in which I provide an insider’s view of how the leadership of both parties have come to see in the immigration system not so much a law enforcement system that protects America and Americans from aliens, irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, whose presence would pose a threat to national security, public safety, public health and the jobs of Americans, but rather a delivery system for an unlimited supply of cheap and exploitable foreign workers, an unlimited supply of foreign tourists and, for the lawyers of both parties, an unlimited supply of clients.

This is why the critical interior enforcement mission has always been severely understaffed. TSA, for example, has more than 45,000 employees, the NYPD has more than 36,000 officers just to protect the City of New York, but ICE only has about 6,000 agents for the entire United States of America and half of them are not even doing immigration law enforcement but are engaged in investigating narcotics, financial crimes, kiddie porn and intellectual property theft.

The very creation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as a key component of the Department of Homeland Security (that I have come to refer to as the Department of Homeland Surrender) by President George W. Bush in the wake of the terror attacks of 9/11, was designed to undermine, not enhance, border security and/or immigration law enforcement. 

Customs has nothing to do with immigration law enforcement and merging immigration with other non-related agencies and then bifurcating the immigration mission into ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) created what John Hostettler, the former Republican Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims, referred to as “immigration incoherence.”

With all of the threats that America and Americans face from transnational gangs, drug cartels and international terrorist organizations, President Trump has tried to get the funding for a border wall. The Republicans didn’t do anything to help him when they controlled the House of Representatives and the Democrats not only won’t help him but have accused him of creating a false crisis on the border when he declared a “national emergency.”

In response to Trump’s declaration of the national emergency to move money from related programs to fund the border wall, the Democrats are employing the tactic that the ACLU refers to as “lawfare,” filing a blizzard of lawsuits.

Evidence of the dire threats we face have been provided in abundance in a series of Congressional hearings predicated on government reports and threat assessments authored by the intelligence community and DEA.

Democrats created “Sanctuary Cities” and “Sanctuary States” and now the Democrats are calling for the dismantling of ICE altogether and the elimination of America’s borders even though the preface of the official government report, “9/11 and  Terrorist Travel, begins with this paragraph:

It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.

While a wall on the border by itself would not ameliorate the threats, it would represent a vital element of what needs to be a coordinated program to address all of the vulnerabilities in the immigration system.

I have come to compare a secure barrier along the southern border with a wing on an airplane: without the wing the airplane won’t fly; however, a wing by itself goes nowhere.

We need to prevent the entry of illegal aliens and contraband by whatever means they are able to enter the United States. I have frequently referred to the multiple means by which aliens enter the United States as the “Immigration Colander.”  This is why we must understand that the United States has 50 “border states.”

Here are the cold, hard facts that illustrate the severe threats we face that any rational adult would certainly consider a crisis.

To begin with, I would argue that the flood of narcotics into the United States should be seen as a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD).

Fentanyl is as lethal as cyanide.

Furthermore, Americans pay for the poisons to the tune of tens of billions of dollars that flow into the coffers of drug trafficking organizations and terrorist organizations.

My article, “New York City: Hub For The Deadly Drug Trade: ‘Sanctuary’ policies attract foreign drug traffickers, fugitives and terrorists” was, in large measure, predicated on a November 13, 2017 Washington Post news report“Mexican traffickers making New York a hub for lucrative — and deadly — fentanyl.”

Here is how that Washington Post report began:

NEW YORK — The middle-aged couple in the station wagon went shopping at a New Jersey Walmart on a warm night in August. They stopped for dinner at an IHOP on the way home. And when they arrived at their apartment building in a quiet residential section of Queens, the narcotics agents following them got a warrant to go inside.

They found several suitcases loaded with brick-shaped bundles of what appeared to be heroin. But lab tests determined that most of it — 141 pounds — was pure fentanyl, a synthetic and supremely dangerous opioid 50 times more powerful than heroin.

It was the largest fentanyl seizure in U.S. history. There was enough inside the apartment to kill 32 million people, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. 

Let’s imagine that a terror plot has been uncovered for international terrorists to enter the United States to blow up a football stadium filled with 60,000 fans, as in the 1977 cinematic thriller Black Sunday.

Such a huge attack would be devastating and send fear not just across America but across the world.

However, My article “DEA Reports Record Deaths From Drug Overdoses How a broken southern border allows narcotics to flood America” was predicated on the DEA’s 2018 National Drug Threat Assessment that included the following:

• In 1999 drug poisoning in the U.S. accounted for 16,849 deaths, while deaths from suicide, homicide, firearms and motor vehicles accounted for more deaths than did drug poisoning.
• In 2009 deaths attributed to drug poisoning moved into first place with 37,004 such fatalities.
• Since 2009 drug poisoning has accounted for more deaths than did the other causes of death, with a sharp upward trend in the number of such fatalities.  In 2013, 43,982 deaths were attributed to drug poisoning, in 2014 that number increased to 47,055, in 2015 the number jumped to 52,404 and in 2016 that number had skyrocketed to 63,632 deaths.

Because those 63,632 tragic deaths attributed to opiate overdoses did not occur en masse and there was no dramatic explosion, they got very little attention.

Those deadly drugs are pouring into the United States primarily across our southern border and through ports of entry, between ports of entry, as well as through international airports.

A small quantity of fentanyl can kill millions of people, yet the Democrats quibble about whether or not we should construct barriers, not to prevent anyone from entering the United States, but to make certain that all who do enter the country are inspected the same way that passengers who seek to board airliners must undergo a search by TSA.

While the Democrats argue that the wall would be too expensive, not unlike insulation on a house, the wall would pay for itself. That was the premise for my article, “America Needs A Border Wall Like Houses Need Insulation.”

As for the threats posed by international terrorists, my article, “Border Security Is National Security” referenced an April 12, 2017 Washington Times report, Sharafat Ali Khan smuggled terrorist-linked immigrants. My article included the following excerpt:

Khan is a citizen of Pakistan who had established himself as a permanent resident in Brazil and then smuggled numerous illegal aliens from the Middle East into the United States through Mexico.  ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) issued a press release about this case, Foreign national extradited and pleads guilty to human smuggling conspiracy.

That Khan first became a resident of Brazil prior to beginning his smuggling operation is of particular concern. 

Terror training camps run by Hamas and Hezbollah are to be found in the Tri-Border region of Brazil (where Brazil abuts with Argentina and Paraguay).  While there was no specific mention of Khan making use of those camps, given the nature of his crimes, this is a very real and troubling possibility.

It is also entirely possible that members of ISIS and al-Qaeda are present in those terror training camps.

Concerns about the Tri-Border Region were ably reported on in a paper, Islamist Terrorist Threat in the Tri-Border Region that was published by Jeffrey Fields, Research Associate, Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

The U.S./Mexican border is all that stands between America and Middle Eastern terrorists operating throughout  Latin America. As I noted in my recent article, “The Impending Alien Invasion,” Latin America has become a hotbed for terrorist activities, a fact that was highlighted at a hearing conducted on April 17, 2018 by the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence on the topic, “State Sponsors of Terrorism: An Examination of Iran’s Global Terrorism Network.”

My article included an excerpt of the prepared testimony of one of the witnesses, Dr. Emanuele Ottolenghi of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies:

In recent years, Hezbollah’s Latin American networks have also increasingly cooperated with violent drug cartels and criminal syndicates, often with the assistance of local corrupt political elites. Cooperation includes laundering of drug money; arranging multi-ton shipments of cocaine to the United States and Europe; and directly distributing and selling illicit substances to distant markets. Proceeds from these activities finance Hezbollah’s arms procurement; its terror activities overseas; its hold on Lebanon’s political system; and its efforts, both in Lebanon and overseas, to keep Shi’a communities loyal to its cause and complicit in its endeavors.

This toxic crime-terror nexus is fueling both the rising threat of global jihadism and the collapse of law and order across Latin America that is helping drive drugs and people northward into the United States. It is sustaining Hezbollah’s growing financial needs. It is helping Iran and Hezbollah consolidate a local constituency in multiple countries across Latin America. It is thus facilitating their efforts to build safe havens for terrorists and a continent-wide terror infrastructure that they could use to strike U.S. targets.

For the Democrats the only crisis that concerns them is not if hundreds of thousands of Americans lose their lives, but if they lose their next elections.

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EDITORS NOTE: This column with images originally appeared in FrontPage Magazine. It is republished with permission. The featured image is by geralt on Pixabay.