Despite the Biden administration’s insistence for weeks that the situation at the border is a “challenge,” the crisis has turned into a disaster, with FEMA having to be deployed to help manage the massive influx of illegal immigrants. And Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas acknowledging they're on pace to see more migrants cross the southern border than they have in the last 20 years.
While he said they are “expelling most single adults and families," bad actors are exploiting the chaos of the crisis, including drug cartels and human smugglers, as Katie detailed earlier.
But Rep. John Katko (R-NY) is also sounding the alarm about another threat: possible terrorists.
“People who they’ve got in the last few days … have been on the terror watchlist,” said Katko, the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, during a press conference at the border. “Individuals that they have on the watch list for terrorism are now starting to exploit the southern border.”
The threat is not only real; it’s been ongoing, Center for Immigration Studies’ Todd Bensman points out in his new book, “America’s Covert Border War: The Untold Story of The Nation’s Battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration.”
While the U.S.’s counterterrorism strategies have been actively working to keep the country safe, the current border crisis risks undermining those efforts.
“It gets very perilous when you have so many people coming in that your normal controls go off, everything goes offline,” Bensman told Townhall in a recent interview about his book and the situation at the southern border.
Katko is hoping Biden will admit he messed up and reverse course.
“We need to wake up, we need to understand. Listen, Mr. President Biden, you’re an OK guy,” Katko said. “Why don’t you just admit you made a mistake with this policy and go back to the way it was and keep America safe for all of us? And use that money that we’re wasting down here on American citizens. The door should not be open and we should have immigration the right way.”
Katko later added that we're seeing crisis levels at the border due to Biden's policies.
“They’re doing it because President Biden rolled back a lot of the orders of the previous administration that were working," he said. "There is indeed disorder at the border by executive order. No question about it.”