President Obama’s open arms to poorly vetted refugees from mostly Muslim nations, a court decision to free potential terrorists and skimpy protection of crowded markets makes the United States as easy an ISIS target as a Berlin Christmas market, according to experts.
“What happened there could, indeed, happen here—and almost certainly will at some indefinable point in the future,” according to Dan Cadman, a former U.S. immigration official for 30 years.
American officials have suggested that the Germans did not do a good job of vetting the attacker or even protecting the market. But Cadman, also an expert on national security and terrorism, said Washington isn’t doing any better.
While the terrorist, Tunisian Anis Amri was killed in Milan, Italy Friday, he wiggled through several security networks that are similar to how the U.S. tracks potential problem refugees. What’s more, there was no protection around the Berlin market despite repeated claims in the West that an ISIS attack was coming. And it may have been the product of good-hearted German demands to accept more refugees from terrorist-linked nations.
“The whole sequence of events sounds pretty screwed up, and it’s tempting to think of the Germans with contempt. Yet it could easily be a description of something that happens here,” he wrote for the Center for Immigration Studies website.
“We too have an out-of-control asylum system; we too have had a chief executive constantly haranguing the populace at large to see only unexpurgated good in refugees and asylees; we too have seen increasing numbers of dubious and badly vetted migrant influxes from jihadist-infected parts of the world, even as our Congress does nothing to rein the executive in – an executive who has, for no discernible reason, even negotiated a deal with Australia to take large numbers of primarily Middle Easterners off that country’s hands and out of its offshore detention centers. And we too rarely detain asylum seekers while they wend their way ever so slowly, slowly through a cumbersome administrative system which permits them to remain for months (sometimes years) and gives them many bites at the apple should they be denied the first time,” he added.
What’s more, he said, even if detained, people must eventually be freed due to a key court decision.
“Lastly, and significantly, we too are plagued with the problem of countries refusing to accept their nationals back when they are ordered deported, and our State Department has consistently refused to exercise its considerable muscle to force a change in attitude on the part of recalcitrant governments. And what happens when the immigration authorities can’t get the needed travel documents for repatriation? Why, after six months (in the off chance that they were detained, for example because of extensive criminal histories) they are released into the street, courtesy of a Supreme Court decision which makes keeping them in custody beyond that point a near-impossibility,” wrote Cadman.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
