Terror and the Mexico border: How big a threat?
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Conservatives and the Obama administration have long disagreed about the threat of terrorists coming across the Mexico border. Data suggest the threat is not insignificant. Now, the Trump administration is poised to make it a priority.
NOGALES, ARIZ.—Islamic militants purchase a nuclear device from a sympathetic official in Pakistan and ship the weapon on the flip side of a drug trafficking route through West Africa to South America. Next, the package is smuggled north to the United States-Mexico border.
Although this sounds like the plot line of a spy thriller, it is a scenario laid out in an online magazine produced by the Islamic State, the apocalyptic Syria-based terror group also known as ISIS.
“From there it’s just a quick hop through a smuggling tunnel and … presto, they’re mingling with another 12 million ‘illegal’ aliens in America with a nuclear bomb in the trunk of their car,” the 2015 ISIS article says.
The debate over security along the US-Mexico border isn’t just about the millions of unauthorized migrants who have crossed the international boundary seeking work and better lives. And it isn’t just about the drug smugglers and assorted other criminals who routinely use the border as an easy back door into America.
There is potentially a greater threat from a porous southern border.
Conservatives have long warned that terror groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda might try to exploit drug and migrant smuggling routes from Mexico to sneak into the US undetected.
The threat isn’t merely speculative.
From November 2013 to July 2014, officials apprehended 143 individuals listed on the US terror watch list trying to cross the Mexico border and enter the US illegally, according to a confidential Texas Department of Public Safety report obtained by the Houston Chronicle.
And last summer, the US military’s Southern Command warned in an intelligence report that Muslim extremists were using existing migrant smuggling rings in Latin America to gain entry to the US across the Mexico border, according to an account in the Washington Free Beacon.
The Obama administration and its supporters have consistently sought to downplay the threat of terrorists crossing the Mexican border. They say the border is secure and that the threat of terrorists crossing illegally from Mexico is overstated.
No terror plot carried out in the US homeland has involved personnel or material transported across the US-Mexico border.
But to some, that is small comfort.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2017/0115/Terror-and-the-Mexico-border-How-big-a-threat?ref=yfp