Raheem Kassam and Todd Bensman discuss one of the lesser known threats at the U.S. southern border: radical Islamic terrorism and Bensman’s new book Listen to the March 9, 2021 national podcast here
“Every year there are between three and four thousand migrants who reach the US southern border from all of those countries… Muslim-majority countries in North Africa, South Asia and the Middle East and they’re able to make it over the Atlantic with the aid of these very specialized human smugglers. Quite a few of them over the years have turned out to be jihadists that were apprehended in Latin America on their way to the border and at the border. There are established routes that bridge the Atlantic so that this is a possible route into the United States. Jihadists are able to operate best in these current circumstances, meaning they are able to cross the borders when border management systems have broken down under the weight of human volume. And that is where we are now at the US southern border. The normal systems for vetting and detention and processing are breaking down very rapidly right now, just as they did in Europe, and jihadists thrive on that. That is how they get through. The fear here and the heightened threat, in my view, is that those extra continental migrants … are able to get into the United States without the vetting that is necessary. The covert border war that I talk about does have cordons and vetting set up and government programs. But that covert border war, those processes, fall apart in circumstances like these.”