Smuggling operations on the southern border have allowed significant levels of terrorist migration to the United States, including some individuals connected to an al Qaeda affiliate, a Texas public safety official warned Congress.
“Clearly, there are special-interest aliens anywhere from Afghanistan to Yemen that have been coming across the Texas-Mexican border that have been detected and apprehended by border patrol,” Texas director of public safety Steven McCraw told Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., during a Wednesday hearing.
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“As it relates to al Shabaab and the connection to Somalians, it’s an FBI case,” he said. “A Somalian smuggling operation out of San Antonio would bring Somalians across and help them resettle across the United States, and there had been a nexus determined in that investigation to terrorism.”
That testimony dovetailed with remarks from Border Patrol officials at the hearing, which was focused on national security threats at the border. Those officials testified that the agency is on the lookout for “continuously evolving tactics of terrorists, smuggling and trafficking networks, and other criminals,” as the acting chief of the Border Patrol said.
McCraw suggested several thousand people from “special-interest countries” have come to the United States every year since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, based on a study conducted by a senior analyst at his agency drawn from research at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School.
“[T]he NPS study concluded that research had uncovered ‘a surprising number of terrorism reference points associated with SIAs and their smugglers,'” McCraw wrote in his prepared testimony. “Among the more prevalent of these were Somalis, who crossed the southern border and were later accused in court proceedings of terrorism involvements while half way through or all the way through the asylum process.”
Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, protested that law enforcement officials are required to implement an effective “catch-and-release” policy for many of the illegal immigrants caught at the border. But he emphasized that cases involving people from countries with major terrorist movements do not fall under that rubric.
“We notify the FBI immediately, if they’re from a special-interest country,” he said.
