{"id":2709,"date":"2008-02-19T10:03:28","date_gmt":"2008-02-19T15:03:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2008\/02\/19\/national-security-at-the-border\/"},"modified":"2009-07-03T18:08:37","modified_gmt":"2009-07-03T22:08:37","slug":"national-security-at-the-border","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2008\/02\/national-security-at-the-border\/","title":{"rendered":"National Security At the Border"},"content":{"rendered":"

Human Events<\/a> | Robert Spencer | Feb. 19, 2008<\/p>\n

Three Afghanis were arrested Wednesday at an international airport in India\u2019s Kerala state for flying with forged Mexican passports. They had just arrived there from Kuwait, where officials examined the passports identifying them as \u201cAntonio Lopez Juan,\u201d \u201cJavier Sanchez Alberto,\u201d and \u201cAtonio Lopez Ernesto,\u201d and found that they didn\u2019t understand any Spanish. <\/p>\n

Maybe they were also suspicious of these inept attempts to ape Spanish names. <\/p>\n

\u201cAntonio,\u201d \u201cJavier,\u201d and \u201cAtonio\u201d insisted they were trying to get to France, but given their newly-minted Mexican identities, that seems about as likely as the possibility that Hillary Clinton will cede the Democratic nomination gracefully to Barack Obama. Now what could Afghan nationals who don\u2019t speak Spanish want with Mexican passports? Maybe they were really tired of Afghan fare and were craving some enchiladas. Or maybe they were hoping to craft a new brand of Afghan\/mariachi music. <\/p>\n

From the general level of concern exhibited in official Washington after other evidence of jihadist attempts to cross into the U.S. from Mexico, one might reasonably assume that nothing more worrisome than mariachi is going on. But in the real world, this incident is yet another indication of the national security aspect of the immigration issue.<\/p>\n

The warnings have been coming in for years. In June 2004, border patrol agents arrested 77 \u201cMiddle Eastern\u201d men attempting to enter the U.S. illegally. Congressman Solomon Ortiz (D-Tex.) said that such attempts are \u201chappening all over the place. It\u2019s very, very scary.\u201d In October of that year, intelligence officials began investigating allegations that 25 nationals from another hotbed of jihad, Chechnya, had crossed into the country across the Arizona border. And the next month, a captured Egyptian jihadist named Sharif al-Masri told interrogators about Al-Qaeda\u2019s plans to \u201csmuggle nuclear materials to Mexico,\u201d where \u201coperatives would carry material into the U.S.\u201d A Bangladeshi Muslim, Fakhrul Islam, was arrested in December 2004 while trying to cross into Texas from Mexico. With him were members of the Central American Mara Salvatruchas gang, which some officials allege has ties to Al-Qaeda.<\/p>\n

In June 2005, the FBI uncovered an operation dedicated to smuggling Iranians into the United States from Mexico. Five months later, Congresswoman Sue Myrick (R-NC) said: \u201cThey just arrested, down on the border, a couple of weeks ago, three al-Qaeda members who came across from Mexico into the United States.\u201d And in December of that year, immigration crusader Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO) revealed that 51 illegal immigrants were arrested on terror-related charges between October 2004 and December 2005. In November 2007, the FBI issued an advisory about a plan by jihadists in league with Mexican drug lords to cross the border via underground tunnels and attack the intelligence training center at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, twenty miles from the border with Mexico. \u201cThe Afghanis and Iraqis,\u201d one official explained, paid the Mexicans $20,000 or \u201cthe equivalent in weapons\u201d for their help in getting into the U.S., and \u201cshaved their beards so as not to appear to be Middle Easterners.\u201d<\/p>\n

If all this isn\u2019t an argument for border security, what is? Perhaps the most curious aspect of these stories that are two and three years old is that they didn\u2019t get national attention, and didn\u2019t result in genuine action to secure our borders. But with the latest incident in India, McCain, Hillary, and Obama should be asked pointed questions about their immigration policies, and asked to go beyond the dismissal of immigration controls as \u201cracism\u201d to address the genuine national security issues involved in the continued porous state of our southern border. <\/p>\n

. . . more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Human Events | Robert Spencer | Feb. 19, 2008 Three Afghanis were arrested Wednesday at an international airport in India\u2019s Kerala state for flying with forged Mexican passports. They had just arrived there from Kuwait, where officials examined the passports identifying them as \u201cAntonio Lopez Juan,\u201d \u201cJavier Sanchez Alberto,\u201d and \u201cAtonio Lopez Ernesto,\u201d and found … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":497,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[118,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-illegal-immigration","category-terrorism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/497"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2709\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}