Democrats who say there is no threat of terrorists crossing our border are delusional

The border fence between San Diego, Calif., and Tijuana, Mexico, Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2019. (AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)

According to the Democrats and the mainstream media, Americans shouldn’t be concerned about terrorists crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

Ever since President Donald Trump began highlighting the connection between weak border security and terrorist infiltration, his political opponents have done everything to downplay the real consequences of our broken immigration system.

Rising Democratic superstar Beto O’Rourke, for example, slammed the president’s “rhetoric” on illegal immigration last year, arguing that there is simply no connection between terrorism and the southern border.

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"[Z]ero, precisely zero, terrorists, terrorist groups, or terror plots have ever been connected with the U.S.-Mexico border to do harm to people within the United States," Beto said during a campaign event.

Sadly, O’Rourke is not alone in his delusions. When President Trump claimed that some Middle Easterners joined last year’s caravan of illegal immigrants, for instance, CNBC published an article arguing that the president simply had a political strategy to “link illegal immigration to crime, terrorism, and economic competition and blame Democrats for it.”

Contrary to the Democrat narrative, however, there is a very clear factual connection between terrorism and weak border security. I would know – I hunted terrorists for a living.

According to a 2018 report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), U.S. authorities have apprehended as many as 15 suspected terrorists attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border since 2001. They were affiliated with groups such as ISIS, Hezbollah, the Pakistani Taliban, and others. At least five of those 15 migrants were separately prosecuted in North America for various crimes, including attempted murder, lying to the FBI about terrorism involvement, and providing material support to a terrorist organization.

However, since terrorism-related statistics are often classified, the actual number of detained terrorists is likely much higher than we know from public records.

“The 15 terrorism-associated migrants who traveled to the U.S. southern border likely represent a significant under-count since most information reflecting such border-crossers resides in classified or protected government archives,” CIS observes. “Most information relevant to addressing the question of how often terrorist suspects were apprehended at, or migrating to, the border would reside in government intelligence database systems exempt from public disclosure, and no collection of relevant publicly available material could be found,” CIS explains.

Based on information from intelligence sources, CIS states that at least 100 migrants from “countries of interest” who matched U.S. terrorist “watch lists” were apprehended “at or en route to the southern border” between 2012-2017.

It’s impossible to know how many terrorists have successfully crossed the U.S.-Mexico border undetected — and that’s why President Trump’s concern about border security is completely justified.

History teaches us that it only takes one radical to detonate a bomb at a busy square or drive a truck through a crowd of innocent people. Without a border wall, those radicals can simply walk into our country, and pick their target at leisure.

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America shouldn’t lay out a welcome mat for terrorists who want to do us harm. It’s time to change our broken immigration laws by choosing security over insanity.

Denying that the danger exists, as the Democrats are doing, is a reckless political stunt that puts American citizens at tremendous risk.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE BY BRETT VELICOVICH