illegal immigration
How to Lower the Risk of New Terror Strikes by Border-Crossing Islamist Extremists
U.S.-bound Mauritanian migrants in Costa Rica near the Nicaraguan border. 2022 Photo by Todd Bensman.
From the Center for Immigration Studies
By Todd Bensman
So a border-crossing illegal immigrant has finally conducted a terror attack just as the FBI Director and the U.S. intelligence community has warned with increasing frequency would happen because of a 2021-2024 mass migration border crisis the New York Times recently concluded was the “largest in U.S. history”, fomented by policies of the Joe Biden administration.
Mauritanian national Sidi Mohammad Abdallahi, who illegally crossed the southern border during it in March 2023, entered the U.S. history books October 26 as the first to validate the long-hypothesized border terror infiltration threat with an attempt to massacre Jews and police in Chicago – as detailed in Part 1 and Part 2 of this “First Blood” series.
Now what? How might the incoming second administration of President Donald Trump reduce the threat of more such attacks with millions of foreign strangers already inside the United States and more constantly trying the southern land border?
Following are some remedies, starting with a highly viable one that comes from a most unexpected quarter, the Democratic administration of President Barack Obama and perhaps best frames where many solutions must aim: a category of illegal aliens the government has long termed “special interest aliens (SIAs)” or variations thereof, for hailing from countries where Islamist terrorist groups operate.
In June 2016, Obama’s DHS Secretary, Jeh Johnson, issued a three-page unclassified memorandum titled “Cross-Border Movement of Special Interest Aliens“. It ordered DHS border security and immigration agency directors to develop a concerted, whole-of-government initiative that would more robustly apply security vetting to SIA border-crossers and much more.
DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson’s 2016 Memo on Special Interest Aliens.
Since 2004 in the aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. Border Patrol and the US intelligence community came up with the SIA category tag to slap on apprehended illegal aliens who hailed from 35 mostly Muslim majority “countries of interest” where Islamist extremism and terrorist groups operated. Mauritania has long been on the intelligence community-created list, and Abdallahi therefore was an SIA.
The SIA tag didn’t mean the aliens were actual terrorists, of course, just that FBI or qualified intelligence officers would take a good, hard look at each to make sure they weren’t. To do that, agents endeavored to conduct intensive in-person interviews with them in detention centers, go through pocket trash and phones, and maybe check with amenable foreign intelligence agencies, looking for terrorism indicators that might weed out for deportation any who turned up as problematic.
Something related to “the increased global movement of SIAs” Johnson mentioned in the memo had clearly spooked him in 2016, perhaps the Muslim immigrants then pouring over European Union border in a mass migration surge, among them some who conducted attacks across the continent. (See: What Terrorist Migration Over European Borders Can Teach About American Border Security.) Perhaps he worried that the SIA security vetting program had fallen into dangerous disrepair a dozen years into it.
“As we all appreciate, SIAs may consist of those who are potential national security threats to our homeland”, the secretary wrote in the 2016 memo. “Thus the need for continued vigilance in this particular area.”
Whatever it was, the Johnson memo demanded the “immediate attention” of underlings to form a “multi-DHS Component ‘SIA Joint Action Group.’” The memo outlined plan objectives. Intelligence collection and analysis, Johnson wrote, would drive efforts to “counter the threats posed by the smuggling of SIAs.” Coordinated investigations would “bring down organizations involved in the smuggling of SIAs into and within the United States”, he wrote.
Border and port of entry operations capacities would “help us identify and interdict SIAs of national security concern who attempt to enter the United States” and “evaluate our border and port of entry security posture to ensure our resources are appropriately aligned to address trends in the migration of SIAs.”
The Obama administration’s SIA initiative never fully developed before Donald Trump took office in January 2017 and was soon lost in the shuffle, even though the old unreformed SIA vetting program remained in place, its FBI interviewers supplemented by specially trained agents of a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol unit called Tactical Terrorism Response Teams (TTRTs) working ICE facilities.
But the Trump administration should resurrect the Johnson idea because an SIA action task force has never been needed more than now, both at the border and in the interior, with so many SIAs like Abdallahi now living inside the country with virtually no vetting beyond largely ineffective database biometrics checks before release.
A Counterterrorism Program Swamped to Oblivion
Johnson was considering the idea at a time when perhaps 3,000-4,000 SIAs per year were apprehended at the border on average. (See: Terrorist Infiltration Threat at the Southwest Border.)
But today, the SIA vetting program is all but nonexistent, swamped to oblivion by the epic Biden-era mass migration crisis that brought in tens of thousands of SIAs per year, including at least 400 \who were on the FBI’s terrorism watch list by the end of 2024. A majority are thought to have traveled from South American landing countries through the Colombia-Panama “Darien Gap” migration passage where enabling governments have facilitated northward passages by bus through to Nicaragua.
Under no circumstance could responsible agencies possibly interview and investigate more than a miniscule fraction of them. It is almost certain that Abdallahi did not undergo a face-to-face interview with a trained federal agent before he was released to go to Chicago.
Indeed, data leaked to the media shows that nearly 75,000 SIAs reached the southern border between October 2022 and August 2023. Another 30,000 SIAs entered in the following 15 months through February 2024, the Daily Caller reported. The Biden DHS responded by reducing the number of SIA countries from 35 to about 13 (still including Mauritania), another House Judiciary Subcommittee report said.
A Biden-era cell phone app-based parole scheme (CBP One) gave thousands more SIAs from two dozen of the countries permission to cross the border on legally questioned mass humanitarian parole with ineffective security vetting. (See: Thousands of ‘Special Interest Aliens’ Posing Potential National Security Risks Entering via CBP One App.) Among them were some Tajikistanis arrested in a multi-state FBI counterterrorism wiretap sting in three cities. (See: After Suspected Tajik Terrorist Arrests, Little-Known Biden Border Entry Program Demands Hard Focus.)
Far from able to interview these overwhelming thousands, every federal agent assigned to the border was so swamped that at least 99 illegal aliens who were on the terrorism watch list were accidentally released, an August 2024 House Judiciary Committee report said.
Key Recommendations
These facts present an argument for the incoming Trump administration’s DHS to follow through on Johnson’s idea to establish an aggressive SIA action task force that can quickly assess and oversee the resurrection of a more thorough, well-resourced vetting program at the land borders as other policies reduce overall migration flow to pre-Biden numbers. But that’s only a start to onboard other remedies that will reduce the current heightened risk from unvetted SIAs. Other high-priority solutions are as follows:
At the land borders
- Restore the list of SIA countries to prior lengths; prioritize and resource federal personnel to conduct enhanced in-person vetting inside detention centers with a goal of 100 percent while more emphatically exploiting and enhancing the capabilities of the National Vetting Center (NVC) to assist in detecting derogatory information. (President Trump originally established the NVC, which the Biden administration maintained.) Consider the use of state and local fusion center officers and analysts as trusted partners to conduct vetting in detention centers under section 103 (a)(10) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which allows the federal use of state and local police resources. Encourage a congressional oversight responsibility with annual reporting requirements to ensure the SIA counterterrorism enterprise at the borders remains impactful, updated, and appropriately resourced.
- Institute extended detention time and misdemeanor federal prosecution for illegal entry by SIAs and discourage any availability of bond-outs for SIAs; ensure that bed space availability is always commensurate with average SIA apprehension rates so that room is consistently available for detention times necessary for security screening, investigative efforts, court proceedings, or final removals.
In the U.S. interior
- Convene regional ICE task forces that will compile databases of SIAs released into the United States since January 2021 under Biden-era policies and parole programs and require them to undergo belated enhanced security screenings, to include interviews, that were not previously conducted when they were released. Officers would act on derogatory information from abroad but also any uncovered during U.S. residency.
- Prioritize and resource asylum fraud investigations of SIAs by empowering officers of the Fraud, Detection and National Security Directorate (FDNS) of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to conduct forensic analyses of random samples of asylum claims by SIAs. Grant FDNS agents arrest and investigative referral authorities independent of any other agency, including ICE. Substantially increase FDNS investigative staff and train USCIS’s asylum officer corps to conduct national security vetting during the “credible fear” interview process in synchronicity with routine duties.
- Have the Attorney General direct U.S. Attorneys to accept and prioritize asylum fraud case prosecutions and referrals from the newly empowered FDNS officer corps, resolving Government Accountability Office reporting in recent years that shows U.S. Attorneys reject most asylum fraud referrals.
- Direct appropriate law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute U.S.-based individuals who encourage, induce, or directly fund the illegal cross-border smuggling of SIAs, for deterrent effect, under Section 274 (A)(1)(IV) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Abroad
- Fully collaborate with the new Panamanian government in its plan to close the Darien Gap, through which many SIAs travel, by funding highly deterring, large-scale foreign repatriation flights to home countries and local detention facilities as needed. Provide aircraft as necessary. Furthermore, require large-scale repatriation flight programs in Colombia and Costa Rica. Consider funding repatriation flights from Mexico. Apply diplomatic pressure as appropriate on recalcitrant home nations to accept the flights.
- Create a contingency plan to implement “offshore” asylum processing centers in countries of transit and origin, in conjunction with US-funded foreign air repatriation programs.
- Increase the number of American law enforcement screeners able to interview SIAs in detention facilities of Mexico, Honduras, Panama, Brazil, and other Latin American countries known for the staging and transit of SIAs.
- Direct and prioritize a surge of SIA smuggling investigations in Latin America by ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI); ensure more HSI units target SIA smuggling as a larger percentage of total crime categories in South America, Central America, and in Mexico.
- Use all tools of government power to ensure that the governments of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Ecuador, and (eventually) Cuba more robustly monitor, vet, audit, investigate, and prosecute corrupt practices within their consulates and embassies in countries of national security interest as a means to reduce wrongful issuances of visas.
Managing down the risks associated with SIA flows and detection of terrorism-minded immigrants within them, of course, gets easier when other deterrence policies reduce the overall numbers. Finding needles is easier when the haystacks are small.
Business
FEMA Quietly Slid $59 Million Out The Door For Illegal Migrants To Put Their Feet Up At ‘Luxury Hotels’: Musk
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Jason Hopkins
“That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals!” he continued. “A clawback demand will be made today to recoup those funds.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) handed out $59 million to “luxury” hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants, Elon Musk said Monday.
Musk — who leads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a temporary agency within the Trump administration tasked with weeding out frivolous spending by the federal government — said it was his DOGE team that made the discovery. The top White House official said the payment was in violation of President Donald Trump’s executive order and efforts would be made to recover the funds.
“The @DOGE team just discovered that FEMA sent $59M LAST WEEK to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants,” Musk posted on X. “Sending this money violated the law and is in gross insubordination to the President’s executive order.”
“That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals!” he continued. “A clawback demand will be made today to recoup those funds.”
The details around the alleged payout are not completely clear. FEMA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation, nor did a spokesperson for DOGE.
Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in October denied the Biden administration was using FEMA funds for migrant accommodations, but in 2022 she suggested that the agency was assisting cities with the migrant crisis.
On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order that placed a temporary suspension on refugee resettlement into the United States. The president additionally noted how some major cities, like New York City and Chicago, have requested federal aid to help manage the massive influx of migrants entering their jurisdictions.
The president additionally signed an executive order placing a freeze on federal grants and loans as it conducts a review of the government’s spending, but that order has since been blocked by the courts.
However, New York City officials have a long history of placing illegal migrants into four-star hotels as they’ve struggled to find accommodations for the sheer number of asylum seekers flocking to the Big Apple.
New York City began housing migrants in the four-star Collective Paper Factory hotel around August 2023 after it was reorganized into a Department of Homeless Services emergency shelter. The five-story Collective Paper Factory itself is equipped with a restaurant, a gym, a bar, meeting rooms for guests and communal spaces.
The “chic” Square Hotel was converted into housing for migrants. Other “upscale” hotels in the Big Apple have also been converted into migrant housing in the past as city officials continue to deal with the migrant crisis, including The Row, which has also been described as a “four-star hotel.”
“A 4-star hotel is considered luxury lodging,” according to Kayak, a company that provides hotel booking services. “Guest rooms are noticeably more spacious, with top-quality linens, pillowtop mattresses, bathrobes, slippers, minibars, and upscale toiletries, plus equipped kitchens.”
NYC’s Department of Homeless Services was reportedly seeking a contract with local hotels to provide roughly 14,000 rooms in order to shelter migrants through 2025. City officials anticipated spending on migrants in need of housing for the current fiscal year and the past two years combined will exceed $2.3 billion, with a significant amount of these costs going toward hotel rent.
The Big Apple — a sanctuary city jurisdiction with strict laws restricting cooperation between local law enforcement and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — has become a major destination for the massive number of illegal migrants who’ve flocked into the United States. Roughly 230,000 migrants have arrived in NYC since the spring of 2022, according to data provided by the mayor’s office.
FEMA underwent an internal investigation in November after it was uncovered that a supervisor reportedly instructed disaster relief workers deployed in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton to avoid houses with Trump signs.
From Todd Bensman for the Daily Wire
As Mexico prepares to position 10,000 troops between cartels and their drug money, odds are the lead will fly
The chosen political slogan of Mexico’s last and current president, “Abrazos, no balazos” (“Hugs, not Bullets”), is often embraced to describe official government policy toward the country’s ultra-violent drug-trafficking cartels. The beauty of this slogan is that it requires no explanation.
The reverse, however, “Bullets, not Hugs,” is probably up next whether Mexico likes it or not. President Donald Trump has just forced Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to capitulate to a threat of ruinous 25% trade tariffs on Mexican exports unless she uses military force to suppress the flow of fentanyl (and illegal immigrant smuggling) over the U.S. southern border. She’s deploying 10,000 troops to cartel country, right smack in the drug-trafficking lanes of Mexico’s far northern precincts along the U.S. border.
This deployment of Mexican troops, however, is quite different from previous ones, in which the main mission was to slow illegal immigration only, including during Trump’s first term and throughout the Biden term. For this one, the Trump mission demand is, as State Department Spokeswoman Tammy Bruce put it recently, that Mexico needs to “…dismantle transnational criminal organizations, halt illegal migration, and stem the flow of fentanyl and precursor chemicals from China.”
That American priority has just put Mexican forces in the crosshairs of the most sensitive cartel hotspot: the blood-soaked zone between heavily armed cartel forces and their money just across the U.S. border.
John Moore/Getty Images
As if this was not provocative enough on its own, a senior Trump official with direct knowledge told me bilateral plans call for at least some of the more trusted of Mexico’s forces to physically attack cartel-run narcotics depots that would include pre-smuggling fentanyl hubs inside Mexico.
Certain U.S. intelligence groups are working with the Mexican government “to give them an exact laydown. They say they’re going to target the narcotics. We’re literally still at the table.”
All of this should prove triggering, literally, to any of Mexico’s nine main cartels once the whole enterprise ramps up in earnest.
I have a good feel for what this set of circumstances portends. As a reporter for Hearst News in San Antonio, Texas, from 2006-2009, I regularly covered the exceptionally bloody civil drug war against the cartels that Felipe de Jesus Calderón Hinojosa (2006-2012) declared and which, after hundreds of thousands of Mexican casualties, spawned the popularly preferred “Hugs, not Bullets” policies of his successors. The U.S. partnered with Mexico throughout the war, providing targeting intelligence and billions of dollars to modernize its security forces. All of that was for a quest to stem the flow of illegal drugs into the United States.
But after six years of ferocious combat and widespread torture and assassination, Mexico retreated in almost total defeat. The drug flow may have dipped from time to time but it never stopped.
In the years since, I’ve often pondered whether Calderón and his successors should have trebled down when defeat seemed inevitable, as did former President George W. Bush during the Iraq war. When the chips were down amid calls for a humiliating U.S. withdrawal during the Iraq war, Bush famously turned the tables by deploying 30,000 more troops. With Mexico, however, disrupting fentanyl production and trafficking with the military will not be easy, and may very well spark another government-cartel war similar to 2006-2012.
John Moore/Getty Images
The stars and planets all seem to be aligning for more violence, including from an unexpected quarter: President Sheinbaum herself may be aching for this fight.
Rodrigo Nieto-Gomez, a Mexico-born and educated national security research professor for the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California said Sheinbaum has installed anti-cartel Morena Party hardliners over much of Mexico’s state security apparatuses. This wing of her party, Nieto-Gomez explained, has been spoiling to shed the “Hugs, not bullets” policy for a good hard fight with the cartels.
Trump is now providing a “top-cover” excuse for them to finally exert the military pressure they’ve been wanting.
“Trump’s actions have temporarily tilted the playing field in favor of Morena,” Nieto-Gomez said. “With the right philosophy and the right level of American support, we may see a different type of violence in Mexico.”
Perhaps a worthy achievable goal for Mexican military fireworks is that it forces a sort of devil’s truce where the cartels, whose leaders are the most consummate and pragmatic of capitalists, ultimately agree to voluntarily quit fentanyl altogether as a good business decision — if the other drugs are allowed to roll in as usual. After all, when the operatives are shooting and dying, they’re spending rather than earning.
What seems certain, however, is that Trump’s inevitable following through on his campaign promises to suppress fentanyl ups the chances of a conflict between the Mexican military and the cartels. No doubt the cartels are now feeling uncharacteristically pinched these days on many other fronts thanks to Trump’s return.
John Moore/Getty Images
Trump has asked his Secretary of State to designate them as foreign terrorist organizations, which would open authorities for America and its allies to seize assets and prosecute banks and people who work with the cartels on serious “material support” crimes. To isolate and weaken them where it counts, in the pocketbook, and disrupt their global operations.
And, of course, Trump has all but killed the biggest cash cow those cartels have seen in years by shuttering the southern border almost hermetically in a matter of days. Their smugglers are moving probably fewer than 500 illegal immigrants a day now, most of them caught and deported right away, compared to 14,000 a day last December. Those numbers are a catastrophe and should drive the cartels to invest everything they have in drug trafficking again.
Because they are now free from babysitting and processing illegal migrants all day long, Border Patrol is back on the drug traffickers full force and they have help, the U.S. military is down there glassing the landscape and using surveillance assets to spot the traffickers.
Some of the cartels were already so frustrated their leaders approved the use of drones to attack U.S. agents standing in the way of drug loads. Cases of firearms attacks on Border Patrol are rising.
Now Mexico’s going to put 10,000 troops in between them and their money?
If she is not already, Sheinbaum should be preparing for the worst right about now. President Trump absolutely expects some kind of real action — with demonstrable results — or else he’ll push that tariff button. She’s under pressure right now to produce something, anything, whether for show or not. And the cartels are ever ready to go to war.
Thanks to former President Joe Biden’s mass migration program, it could very well happen, because now the impulsive, brazen, money-hungry cartels are are extremely well-armed from the billions they all earned over the past four years.
John Moore/Getty Images
Sheinbaum undoubtedly discerns the dangers here and will have to tread carefully between appeasing Trump and sparking another all-out civil war, which many in the United States believe is long overdue. And maybe it is. She and all the cartel leaders would probably feel lucky to cap things down to merely a “splendid little war” like the 1898 Spanish-American war.
But President Trump knows the art of the deal often pivots on what’s good business for everyone involved.
Mexico’s 2006-2012 war shows the cartels will more than likely survive whatever fireworks are coming, if any. Trump may make them realize sooner rather than later that they just have to give up the fentanyl.
* * *
Todd Bensman is a Senior National Security Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and a two-time National Press Club award winner. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and a 23-year veteran newspaper reporter. He is the author of “America’s Covert Border War,” and “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.”
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