Hamas’ sneak attack into Israel across a heavily fortified border has focused new attention on America’s own borders, where Republicans say the next 9/11-style attackers may be planning to enter — or already have.
Lawmakers demanded President Biden acknowledge the risks to the U.S. and respond with more border walls, troop deployments and an end to the catch-and-release free-for-all that has allowed millions of unauthorized migrants to disperse to communities across the country.
“We have to take the example of what just happened here and say to our own intelligence, what do we have along our border? What cells have we allowed to come in here?” Rep. Kevin McCarthy, former speaker of the House, told radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday.
On the campaign trail, GOP candidates were demanding the Biden administration change course.
Bernie Moreno, running for the GOP’s nomination for a Senate seat in Ohio, called for a suspension of all asylum claims through 2025 as a way to shut down the tidal wave of migrants breaching the U.S. border.
“Given the horrifying images we have seen in Israel, America must take action immediately to protect our own nation,” Mr. Moreno said. “Iran’s leaders and the terrorists chant ‘death to Israel,’ and ‘death to America.’ We must prepare to secure Americans and be proactive, not reactive.”
Analysts said the fear is not so much a Hamas-style assault, with gunmen storming through border breaches to shoot up neighborhoods, massacre hundreds at a music festival and carry hostages back home. But they said the attack in Israel shatters the idea that the Middle Eastern terrorist threat is a thing of the past.
“The United States has been living under this delusion for the better part of a decade that there aren’t groups out there that want to attack Western institutions,” said Andrew “Art” Arthur, who served as acting chief of the national security law division at the Immigration and Naturalization Service and later as an immigration judge. “We know from the Oct. 7 attacks that’s not true.”
He said the comparison between the immigration debate now and the years before 2001 is striking.
In particular the 9-11 Commission, in its report on the failures that led to the attack that claimed nearly 3,000 lives, said policymakers pondered questions such as the “right level and kind” of immigration, drugs at the border, smuggling organizations’ growing hand in illegal immigration, and migration pressures in the Caribbean and elsewhere.
But the commission said little attention was given to the possibility of terrorists exploiting the immigration system.
“This is the only reason DHS was created, is to prevent this. And yet it’s the most significant thing they’re not doing,” Mr. Arthur said.
He said there are flashing warning signs of potential danger.
The most visible is the terrorism watchlist, where 151 people on the list have been detected sneaking across the southern border from Oct. 1, 2022, to Aug. 31, 2023, obliterating the previous record of 98 people, also set on Mr. Biden’s watch. During the Trump years, a total of just 11 watchlist suspects were nabbed.
Authorities last year also revealed a terrorist plot to assassinate former President George W. Bush through the use of an Islamic State hit squad an ISIS operative planned to sneak across the border. That operative told an FBI informant that he had already smuggled in two people associated with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militant movement in Lebanon, similar to Hamas in Israel.
That man, Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab, has pleaded guilty to attempting to provide support to terrorists and is awaiting sentencing.
At Homeland Security, the 2024 Homeland Threat Assessment, released last month, said foreign terrorist organizations remain interested in attacking the U.S. But the department suggested illegal drugs and social media disinformation are bigger domestic threats.
America’s actual vulnerability to a terror attack linked to a lax border has been heatedly debated, including at a congressional hearing last month.
“Not a single American has been injured or killed by a terrorist who crossed our southern border without authorization,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Washington Democrat.
Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute, told lawmakers the watchlist numbers are a poor yardstick for terrorism, given problems with the list and the types of names included on there. He said most of those nabbed are likely Colombians associated with rebel insurgencies the U.S. has labeled as terrorists.
“The chance of dying from a foreign-born terrorist attack since 1975 is 1 in 4.4 million per year,” Mr. Nowrasteh said.
But Rodney Scott, who served as chief of the Border Patrol until his ouster by the Biden administration in 2021, said the things he sees on the border “scare the hell out of me.”
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.