President Joe Biden’s migrant flood has drowned anti-terrorism protections adopted after the 9/11 atrocity, Texas security expert Todd Bensman says.
Nationwide, security officers are “all sphinctered up” that a few Muslim migrants will get enraged as Israel throttles Hamas in the Gaza Strip, he told Breitbart News.
Bensman, a former intelligence chief for Texas who now works with the Center for Immigration Studies, said, “Wars over there really inflame passions over here.”
Nearly all of the legal and illegal migrants will keep their heads down and keep at their jobs, he said. But hotheads “can just get a gun and go into a shopping mall and just lay waste to it,” he said.
“You can take a vehicle and drive at high speed along a pedestrian recreational footpath like the Uzbekistani guy did in New York [in 2017] and killed eight people,” said Bensman, who testified at a September hearing held by the House judiciary committee.
The federal government created post-9/11 security measures to tag, identify, and interview migrants from countries with a high prevalence of terrorism, he explained. This “Special Interest Alien” process promised would-be terrorists that they would go through a tough screening process before their hoped-for attack, he said. “We’re going to give you that tag automatically just because you’re from that [high terror] country. We’re going to profile you for nationality. We’re going to bring you in for eyeball-to-eyeball interviews. We’re going to go through your pocket trash [receipts, old tickets, credit cards, etc]. We’re going to make inquiries to friendly foreign intelligence services. We’re going to check military records. We’re going to check everything we can. We’re going to — we’re going to test your story that you’re giving us about your travel and all the rest of that.”
The anti-terror process has worked many times since 9/11 to deter and block terrorist infiltration, he said. But under Biden, “they stopped doing that.”
Bensman is the author of a 2021 book about the issue, titled America’s Covert Border War: The Untold Story of the Nation’s Battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration.
Officials had to stop applying the procedures to migrants, he said, because Mayorkas’s vast inflow of Special Interest Aliens drowned the process.
“Even when times were normal, they couldn’t get to them all. They had to prioritize them when it was 3000 or 4000 [a year],” he explained, “but now … the numbers are astronomical.”
“61,471 migrants from ‘Special Interest Countries’ entered the United States in Fiscal Year 2023,” Breitbart News reported on October 7, adding:
The number of migrants from special interest countries climbed by more than 140% from fiscal year 2022, when Border Patrol agents encountered more than 25,500 Special Interest migrants across the southwest border. In all, more than 86,000 “Special Interest Aliens” made the crossing in two years.
…
According to the source, in Fiscal Year 2023, migrants from more than 280 countries were apprehended by the Border Patrol, including those from 34 countries listed as Special Interest countries. Among the … Special Interest Aliens entering the United States during FY 23 were more than 5,600 Afghans, 3,000 Egyptians, nearly 2,500 Somalis, 2,500 citizens of Bangladesh, nearly 1,300 Pakistanis, 1,200 Eritreans, and almost 1,000 nationals of Tajikistan and Kazakstan.
Nearly 1,700 special interest migrants from Iran, Syria, Morrocco, Jordan, Djibouti, Iraq, Yemen, Turkmenistan, Algeria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates also made entry into the United States.
The 2023 inflow also included 15,400 Turks and 15,000 people from Mauritania.
The mass inflow — and the security risks — were accepted because Biden’s deputies want to boost business with additional workers, renters, and consumers.
The economic factor is the primary reason why the federal government allows migration, and is also why many pro-migration activists — including Republicans — prefer to talk about Biden’s very unpopular migration as if it is all about migrants’ poverty, or detained children, or drugs, crime, civil rights, and terrorists sneaking across the border.
Terror Groups
Not all Islamic groups want to attack Americans in America, Bensman believes.
“Hamas has never been interested in attacking in the United States [because] you don’t shit where you eat,” he said. “They use the United States for fundraising and for influence operations to get people on the side of the Palestinians … I don’t — I wouldn’t expect an attack from Hamas guys.”
Hezbollah is controlled by Iran, which has — so far — avoided direct attacks in the United States. But, he added, “They’re already here. There are clandestine Hezbollah agents just inside the United States and probably most major cities. They’re part of a unit of Hezbollah called ‘910.’ If things go really south on the north [of Israel, along Hezbollah’s base in Lebanon], they may just go ahead and activate the ‘910’ agents who are here in the United States.”
But the Iraqi-based ISIS launched and inspired many terror attacks in the United States and Europe.
For example, ABCNews reported in 2020 that the Islamic State group, also called ISIS, sent an Iraqi man to Ohio, from where he was to help prepare an assassination of former President George W. Bush in Texas.
The man told an FBI agent that he had already moved two gunmen into the United States, Bensman told Breitbart. “Look what happened in Europe. In 2015, the border was crazy open. ISIS’s Foreign Operations Division put together a team that went into Paris and slaughtered 130 people and more in Brussels a month later and all those people snuck in over the border acting like they were refugees and asylum seekers. They even have fake Syrian IDs.”
Conversations about terrorists coming across the border “is just not crazy [fearmongering] stuff — this has happened, and so it could be an organized thing like that,” he said.
Hotheads
When I was in working in Texas [Department of Public Safety] intel, every time a war broke out over there, we would have all these weird incidents, attacks by Arab men on Jewish facilities,” he said. “Sometimes we’d catch them, but there were threats, there were weird incidences all the time. Jews in other parts of the United States had been attacked during these things because wars over there really inflame passions over here. So what I really more expect is that a lot of the Middle Easterners who have come over — not a lot of them, let’s just say some — who really weren’t planning anything, might see the war that’s coming and get inflamed by it and retaliate, and then we find out later that they came over the border [illegally].
“They didn’t come over the border necessarily to conduct an attack. They may have had history with one of these [terror] groups. They may have been radicalized already and we just don’t know it. And so they’re predisposed [to attack].
“This one is going to be the mother [war] of all of them,” Bensman said. “I think this is going to go on for a really long time, there’s going to be a ton of collateral casualties on the Arab side … [and so] in the intelligence world right now, they’re all sphinctered up.”
“You can quote me on that,” he added.
