DHS acknowledges that suspected Islamic terrorists are crossing the southern border

By Todd Bensman as published March 19, 2021 by the Center for Immigration Studies

“We are able to identify and apprehend them and ensure that they do not remain in the United States.”

U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas this week asserted that suspected Islamic terrorists can and have crossed the porous southern border for years, a claim that major media organizations and lawmakers widely pilloried as a fear-mongering falsehood when President Donald Trump and his administration made the same claim in 2019.

Mayorkas’ comments that migrant suspects on U.S. terrorism watch lists cross the border came amid…

By Todd Bensman as originally published March 16, 2021 by the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

More than six weeks have elapsed since a major American journalism scandal broke with the federal arrest of U.S. newspaper editorialist and frequent cable news commentator Kaveh Afrasiabi, who long sold himself as a neutral expert on Iran.

The initial Department of Justice media release alleged that, during all the 13 years Afrasiabi wrote op-eds for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Washington Times, and esteemed academic journals, the Islamic Republic of Iran was richly paying and directing him to propagandize for the regime…

Watching dangerous illegal immigrants walk around free of deportation fear ‘really sucks’

As originally published March 9, 2021 by the Center for Immigration Studies

Learning how immigration policy orders streaming out of the new management in Washington actually play out on the front lines is a tough proposition these days. Few in the field are exactly eager to talk about their jobs when they perceive that high-up bosses hate them. That is most especially true of those who work for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ICE ERO) division, the Democratic Party’s favorite whipping boy.

One of President Biden’s first moves in office was to “pause” almost all ERO…

By Todd Bensman as originally published March 10 by Homeland Security Today

Late last month on Integration Bridge, which spans a Peru-Brazil river border crossing, a U.S.-bound migrant caravan of perhaps 400 repeatedly clashed with militarized border police determined to enforce a coronavirus closure.

By Todd Bensman as originally published March 9, 2021 by The National Pulse

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While former President Trump had a knack for whipping the press into a frenzy no matter what he seemed to say, one issue he touched on in 2018 brought about a tsunami of criticism unlike most others.

What had he dared bring attention to this time? He suggested, based on “very good information,” that it’s not just Central and South American migrants making their way into the U.S. through the southern border, but that dangerous Islamic terrorists were possibly amid the massive caravans. One tweet about Muslim prayer…

‘It’s the sort you’d get at a water park.’

By Todd Bensman as originally published March 2, 2021 by the Center for Immigration Studies

A mass-migration surge along the U.S. southern border has so overwhelmed Mexican cartel-associated smugglers that they are requiring their customers to wear numbered, colored, and labeled wristbands to denote payment and help them manage their swelling human inventory.

Photos and video of the cartel wristbands, provided to the Center for Immigration Studies by Tripwires and Triggers website owner Jaeson Jones, show that migrants discard the wristbands once they have reached the Texas side of the Rio Grande. …

A Unique Migrant Class with National Security Implications

By Todd Bensman, Author of America’s Covert Border War, The Untold Story of the Nation’s Battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration

Last week at a Peru-Brazil river border crossing, a US-bound migrant caravan of many hundreds went to war with militarized border police determined to enforce a coronavirus closure.

After the Peruvians repulsed repeated violent push-through attempts on Integration Bridge in the town of Inapari, both sides settled into a tense multi-day stand-off, the migrants negotiating for government trucks to carry them toward the US southern border.

Most of the 400 or so…