'New norm' on southern border called national security crisis

FPI / January 14, 2020

After the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) earlier this month issued an alert warning Mexico that armed Iranians planned to enter the United States through Mexico, a Mexican border city’s police chief confirmed the region is full of Middle Easterners, Africans and Asians heading north.

The DHS alert, which was largely ignored by the corporate media, warned that a Guatemalan national may try to smuggle five Middle Easterners — including a suicide bomber — into the U.S. through Mexico.

According to the alert, the smuggler and four other men and a woman transited through Guatemala and Belize before reaching Veracruz, Mexico. The Guatemalan, whose name is redacted in the government document, was deported from California a year ago.

A Jan. 11 Spanish-language news report stated that American intelligence officials received the threat after picking up recordings distributed via social media.

The document, issued by the Border Patrol’s regional intelligence operation center in Arizona, says a Mexicali news story cites Mexican authorities downplaying the situation by assuring citizens that the arrival of people from the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Asia and the rest of the Americas is “something normal.”

The Latin American news report cited Mexicali Police Chief María Elena Andrade Ramírez, who said the arrival of people from the Middle East, Africa and Asia as well as the rest of the Americas is “normal” in her California border city of about a million residents.

“This new norm creates a serious national security crisis along the famously porous southern border, though Islamic terrorists have long been present in Mexico,” Judicial Watch noted in its Jan. 13 Corruption Chronicles report.

Judicial Watch investigations have uncovered several operations involving Mexican drug cartels joining forces with Islamic terrorists to enter the U.S. and carry out attacks.

In the spring of 2015, Judicial Watch broke a story about an ISIS training facility just a few miles from the U.S. border near Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Sources at the time, including a Mexican Army field grade officer and a Mexican Federal Police Inspector, confirmed that “coyotes” engaged in human smuggling — and working for the Juárez Cartel — help move ISIS terrorists through the desert and across the border between Santa Teresa and Sunland Park, New Mexico.

A few months later Judicial Watch exposed a separate scheme in which Mexican cartels smuggled foreigners from countries with terrorist ties into a small Texas rural town near El Paso.

A few years ago Judicial Watch obtained State Department documents showing that the government has long known that “Arab extremists” are entering the country through Mexico. Among them was a top Al Qaida operative wanted by the FBI during his cross-border jaunts.

More recently, federal statistics show that unprecedented numbers of migrants from terrorist nations, labeled Special Interest Aliens (SIA) by the government, are entering the U.S. via Mexico. A congressional probe completed in early 2019 found a 300 percent increase in Bangladeshi nationals attempting to sneak into the U.S. through Texas alone. Bangladesh is a south Asian Islamic country well known as a recruiting ground for terrorist groups such as ISIS and Al Qaida Indian Subcontinent (AQIS).

Before the year ended, Mexico confirmed that large groups of migrants from terrorist nations are in Tapachula awaiting asylum in the U.S. and federal authorities in Houston arrested a Mexican-based Bangladeshi smuggler and charged him with bringing in 15 fellow countrymen through the Texas-Mexico border.

When the Central American caravan got started in the fall of 2018, Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales confirmed that nearly 100 ISIS terrorists had been apprehended in the impoverished Central American nation.

Guatemala has long been known as a major smuggling corridor for foreigners from African, Asian and Middle Eastern countries making their way into the U.S. like the Iranians identified recently by the feds.

Free Press International