The Daily Signal - How Illegal Immigration Has Created ‘High Threat Level’ for Terrorist Attack in US

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

America is facing a “high threat level” for a terrorist attack because of the crisis at the southern border, says the head of a group working to curb illegal immigration. “It does not take a lot of people to inflict an extraordinary amount of damage,” said Julie Kirchner, executive director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, citing the 19 terrorists that carried out the attacks on 9/11.  Kirchner says more incidents are happening across America that should raise alarm bells over the threat illegal immigration poses to the safety of the nation. At the beginning of May, for example, two Jordanian illegal aliens attempted to breach a U.S. military base in Quantico, Virginia.  One of the men is reported to have crossed the southern border in April and another overstayed a student visa. The two men tried to drive onto the base “and only due to the quick thinking of some of these guards were they stopped,” Kirchner said, adding that “people need to understand what's going on, because this is a national emergency.”  After more than 10 million illegal aliens have crossed the U.S. border under President Joe Biden, the administration has indicated Biden plans to issue an executive order on the border. Kirchner notes the announcement of a forthcoming executive action on the border comes “six months before … a presidential election.” The head of the Federation for American Immigration Reform joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to explain how America’s border crisis opened a door for terrorism in America, and what can be learned from the recent incident in Quantico.  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What we're seeing right now at the border is an influx of historic proportions. Welcome to the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, May 31st. I'm Virginia Allen. And that was Julie Kirshner, the executive director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, also referred to as Fair. Since the start of the Biden administration, over 10 million illegal aliens have entered America across our borders. Julie is joining the show today to discuss. the threat that that open border situation poses to America and specifically the illegal aliens that are on America's terrorist watch list and what we know about what happens to them after they cross the border. She also discusses the rumored executive order that might soon be coming

out of the Biden administration regarding America's southern border. Stay tuned for my conversation with Julie Kirshner of the Federation for American Immigration Reform after this. We get it. With big media bias, it's hard to find accurate honest news. That's why we've put together the Morning Bell newsletter, a compilation of the top stories and conservative commentary. To subscribe, just head to DailySignal.com slash morning bell subscription or visit DailySignal.com and click on the connect button at the top of the page. Well, it is my honor to welcome to the show today, Julie Kirshner. Julie serves as the executive director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or Fair, as we call it for short. Julie, thanks so much for being here. Thanks. It's a pleasure.

As we're diving in, if you would, share a little bit about what the mission of Fair is. Oh, wow. Well, Fair is, we're celebrating our 45th anniversary this year. Congratulations. Yeah, there are very few nonprofits in D.C. who have been out there working in the trenches this long, and we do solely immigration. So immigration 24-7, our mission is to research, to educate the public on the impacts of mass immigration, and to advocate for solutions that really put the national interests first. So not special interests, not corporate interests, not advocacy groups,

but the national interest first. And so that's our only mission. That's all we do. Wow. So, Julie, you all are in the weeds of this. I'm really privileged here at the Daily Signal to get to report on border and immigration issues and have traveled down to the border a couple times. And one of the questions that I often get from friends, from family, is, is it really as bad as the news says it is, as lawmakers say it is, down at the border.

How would you answer that question? Oh, goodness. I'd say actually probably worse. If you really understood the trouble that the border patrol, well, that all of our border agents are facing, if you understood, If you understood how quickly they're trying to process, the pressure that they're under, what we're seeing right now at the border is an influx of historic proportions, and it has ripple effects throughout the country, but they are scrambling. Instead of, and they don't have to be doing this, but what's really frustrating is they're scrambling to release everyone.

They could be sending people home, but they're not. They're just processing and releasing into the country. So what you see is, and you've heard some of these areas, and I've toured some of these areas, and they'll actually walk you through all of the stations of where, you know, health care stations and this and that and where they get people food and where they get people clothing and so on and so forth. And to move that many human beings through a center at one time all to be released. It's crazy. And then the agents are, I mean, they have the humanitarian mission of just caring for human beings. But then they have their professional mission of trying to find identities, right, and trying to do background checks and trying to do all the stuff that's law enforcement related.

So they're under so much pressure. I don't know how they manage, but thank goodness they're there. Someone's trying to do the job, right? Yeah, they're trying. I remember the first time I went down to the border and realizing, oh, this is like a well-oiled machine. And it has had to become that because they're under so much pressure. they've had to figure out how to work with in this crazy world of what currently is the border crisis. But because they're under that pressure and they're trying to get so many people through,

there's obviously concerns about who is crossing. And we know you all have reported at fair that there have been over 350 individuals on America's terrorist watch list that have crossed the border since Biden took office. What happens specifically to those individuals that Border Patrol sees, they're popping up on America's terrorist watch list. What do we know about where they go? Well, usually they're detained and sent over to ICE for further investigation. Removal proceedings will be initiated.

That's typically what happens. But often, well, what's happening right now with the mass influxes that often they'll start the checks, but they either won't wait for the material to come back. Or we don't necessarily have anything. all the criminal information is in their home countries. And so we're not getting it. We're not able to see it for a variety of reasons. We might not have agreements.

We might have hostile governments. We're just not necessarily privy to all that information. So they could easily get processed and released. And some of these, you know, there have been in several instances over the last few years that are really quite scary. And, you know, we're seeing, I think what's really scary is we're seeing things that happened before 9-11. And no one in the administration seems to be ringing the alarm bells.

We are, daily signal is, you guys are doing great work. But we need more people to understand that this is truly, truly a national security issue. One of those scary incidences just happened earlier in May, and that was two Jordanian illegal aliens attempted to enter a military base in Quantico, Virginia. and one of them we found out is on America's terrorist watch list. Was this, should this be considered an attempted terrorist attack when two illegal aliens without permission tried to enter a U.S. military base? Yeah, it's, should it be considered a terrorist attack?

You know, I think we'll have to get more information on that, but what it could have been easily was a test run, right? I mean, and that is something that's so scary. So there's a lot of information out there. So from what I've heard, one illegally entered the country in April, and another one was apparently a student visa overstay. But then the question is, how did the two hook up? How did they meet?

I mean, did they know each other in advance? They got to this base. They were pretending to be Amazon drivers. What kind of IDs did they have, right? They were in Virginia. Virginia-issue driver. licenses to illegal aliens. How did they, what idea are they presenting? How are they, I mean, how are they managing to live and conduct themselves in the country? And then you get this where they

actually tried to drive in and only, due to the quick thinking of some of these guards where they stopped, I mean, it's, and this is nuts. And what is crazy is that the mainstream media isn't really covering it. We're covering. There are some local reporting. There are some local reporters who deserve real kudos for covering it. But people need to understand what's going on because this is a national emergency, really. Well, and it goes back to that question of the vetting of how on earth could someone enter the country just in April on the terrorist watch list, potentially. It's unclear who among those two individuals, whether it was the visa overstay or the individual who crossed the border in April was on the terrorist watch list. But enter, get all the way up to Virginia by May and make this attempted entry into a military base.

How high of a risk is America at? What threat level are we at right now regarding a terrorist attack because of the situation at the border? Well, I personally think we're at a high threat level. We only needed 19 hijackers on 9-11, right? And it does not take a lot of people to inflict an extraordinary amount of damage. and our government has to be right every single time. I mean, it's a serious responsibility. And I can't understand why the Biden administration

isn't actually taking more action to slow the flow, to actually hold people longer until they're vetted, and to return them. So if they just started returning people, then this flow would crumb to a complete crawl. I mean, you'll always have some people, I mean, you know, in history, you can never really stop it completely. But you can slow it down dramatically to the point where we can vet people and we can hold them and we can do the due diligence that we need to do.

But it's, you know, we've seen multiple incidents now where, you know, just earlier this year, a Chinese national, a Chinese migrant was caught trying to enter a marine base in California and was apprehended. Yeah. I mean, these things are happening. Mainstream media isn't covering them. You know, it's time America needs to wake up and understand that this is, this, it's an amazing to me. And actually, I was thinking about this this morning. What's really going on is that the Biden administration, the president, is not willing to accept responsibility. He doesn't want to.

Politically, it doesn't work for him. He's got to appease this open borders left. And whether you think he actually believes it or not, he's doing everything he can to keep the borders open. and what he's doing is really burden shifting. He's burden shifting everywhere. He's burden shifting to the states. He's burden shifting to the locals. And then now, recently, he's actually saying Mexico,

well, you need to protect your borders. Or, you know, Guatemala, you can't just let all these people walk through your country or you have to have tighter visa restrictions. He's shifting the burden every which way in order to keep the borders open and it's political base happy. And it's just, it's such. an egregious injustice. It's so unfair. We were talking earlier about the national interest and what we stand for at fair and to think that you could have a president who would do this,

go to such lengths to keep the borders open. It's just mind-blowing. It is mind-blowing. And we've heard these rumblings that President Biden might be considering some sort of executive order on the border that he says would give the authority, or rumors are would give the president the authority to, quote, unquote, close the border. What do we know about this possible forthcoming executive border that we've been hearing a lot about for weeks, but there's no real concrete information right now? Well, miraculously, you know, after three years of chaos and crisis and six months before, right, re-election or a presidential election, he's thinking of executive action. So I think everyone should be aware of the context that this is being done.

But we've been urging President Biden to use a section of the law. It's called Section 212F of the Immigration Nationality Act. And it's a sweeping authority that actually he has used before. President Biden has used it before with respect to COVID at the borders during the pandemic. But it basically allows the president to. I think the words are deny the entry of aliens whenever it is deemed detrimental to the interest to allow them to come in. So it's a very sweeping authority. He can do it. He can say basically these aliens are their entry is detrimental to the United States and you deny them entry, you push

them back. So the problem is for him is he's got political problems on the left because the left will say, oh, you're denying everyone in asylum, the ability to claim asylum, right? Everyone is obviously legitimate asylum seeker, you know. They're all legitimate. They all have claims. Forget the law, forget history, forget course cases, but they're all legitimate asylum seekers.

And, you know, so he'll get flack from the left. You know, and from our perspective, it's sort of, well, why have you waited till now? You could have done this before. You didn't need Congress. You didn't anyone. And actually what's a shame is that he actually doesn't even really need this executive order if he enforced the laws. I mean, he could do it today.

Yeah. I think that's critical if he enforced the laws. If today President Joe Biden started enforcing the laws that are already on the books, what would change? Yeah, well, he could use, for example, to process called expedited removal. So instead of putting people, I call it the shuneration. deportation process and the long deportation process. Most people are familiar with the long deportation process. Well, you get your notice to appear in court. You go off. They release you. You get to live and work in the United States and maybe five years down the road. You get a court date. Blah, blah, blah,

blah. Well, the short one, and it's been on the books, and the administration is required to use it in many circumstances is called expedited removal. They're not even put in that line in the courts. They're just, we see you, we apprehend you at the border, and basically, you don't even go through the court system. You can claim asylum. You can have a hearing with an asylum officer. But if you don't pass that bar, that first bar for asylum, you're out. And that's it. No court hearing, no nothing.

And that is on the books. It's been on the books for decades now. And the Biden administration won't use it. They're just using, they're putting everyone into the long lines. instead of using this wonderful tool that's been used by Trump, Obama, Clinton, you name it. Actually, I believe it was Clinton who signed it into law. Wow. So, yeah.

And in that sense, you would think if so many Democrats have used it before, that it wouldn't be a problem. No, it's not a problem. They just don't want to do it. This is their policy is open borders. Their policy is to let as many people in and release them all, let them live and work. And a lot of these people will get work permits. will get benefits. It's amazing when you see the laws, how the laws overlap, how many, how easy it is for people to get benefits. And it's costing taxpayers, everything. It's not only, you know,

they're paying in their pocketbooks, they're paying insecurity, they're paying every, at every level of government, we are subsidizing mass illegal immigration. And we've touched on this really briefly, But obviously, the big question is why. And as you've referenced, there does appear to be a political motive. Is it purely that, you think, driving the why? I think I would say yes. I don't, I can't, because if everyone can see, it's not working. So this is not a policy choice based on good outcomes.

This is a policy choice based on, we believe that open borders is good for our country, at least good for our political party. And, you know, if you want to be gracious, you could say they think it's good for the country. But I personally think there are a lot of people on who support the president, who support these policies, who actually believe in sort of this migrant-first policy that the interests of migrants come ahead of the interests of, Americans. And we believe the opposite. We believe Americans should be deciding their own immigration policy, and it should benefit Americans first and foremost. And there is a lot of, you know, there are a lot of programs that we've had over the course of history, humanitarian programs,

that we believe are in our national interest because they benefit everyone. But where we're going now, I mean, to think that foreign nationals, foreign governments, you know, when you outsource your border security to the government of Mexico, what kind of results are you going to expect? Yeah. Yeah. So we need to take care of United States. We need to take care of our borders.

We need to take care of Americans and have a policy that's based on the rule of law, because that's really, isn't that really why all these migrants come? I mean, if you ask me, it's not because... it's not because of any one particular outcome that they've been promised, but most people feel like if they come to the United States, they will be treated fairly. Equal justice under law, right? And that is in that sense, that's that a beacon, that light that America offers.

But if you destroy our system, if you say the laws don't matter and we don't enforce them, and everyone can come and, you know, forget the generations of immigrants who've come before. they don't get the benefit of the rule of law. They don't get to decide their own future here in America. Now that they've become Americans, you really undermine the fabric of our system. And that is something we're fighting for, and we're fighting hard.

Well put. I want to take a second to sort of talk about that million-dollar question, the policy question, of how do we go about removing unnecessary red tape so we can make it attractive for people to come the legal way? Because in many ways, you're like, all right, I do understand why some individuals are saying, I don't want to wait in a line to come legally for five, ten years.

I'll just cross the border and I'll be in America tomorrow. So what does that reform process look like of saying, okay, we're still going to have strong laws related to immigration related to asylum? And for those claims that are legitimate and individuals that want to come the right way, we're going to remove that unnecessary red tape. Well, first, I think actually it starts with ending illegal immigration or reducing it. What happens is, and I worked in Homeland Security for four years, I absolutely saw it up front. What happens is you have USCIS and our agencies right now, they're scrambling to improve as many work permits as possible for all of these illegal migrants.

I mean, they have people dedicated. And what happens in these big agencies is when they have influx of work, they pull people off of teams who might be processing other visas. And they're like, oh, you're going to get a special assignment to go do work permits. Or we need to find more asylum officers. Or we're going to pull you over and retrain you or this or that. And they're pulling people off of the line who do other work, other important work. I mean, you have green card applications that are taking now a lot long. and it's not COVID. It's not the pandemic. They're pulling people off the line to deal with this

crisis. And when that happens, I mean, even illegal immigrants suffer. I mean, this is to your point. Everyone is suffering for this to somehow sustain, buoy this open border system. It's nuts. It is nuts. Julie, tell us how we can follow the work affair and support the work that you guys are doing because it's critical. Oh, that's really nice of you. Thank you. Yes, go to our website that's fair us.org, F-A-I-R-U-S-D-O-R-U-S-O-R, take a look at what we offer. We try and provide all sorts of news content. You know, every single day we're trying to get stuff up there. You can go donate.

You can do all sorts of stuff. But it's just really important that people get involved. And they become educated because the educated activist is the effective, you know, activists. So we want people to learn about this. And, you know, we need them to go out there and talk to their policy makers, their leaders, and start being thought leaders in their own communities. That's when we change things. And this issue is not going away.

No, it's not. It's not, sadly. Julie, thank you for your time. Really appreciate it. Well, thank you for having me. And with that, that's going to do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for joining us here on the Daily Signal podcast. Make sure that you check out our evening show every weekday around 5 p.m.

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The Daily Signal podcast is made possible because of listeners like you. Executive producers are Rob Bluey and Kate Trinko. Hosts are Virginia Allen, Brian Gottstein, Mary Margaret O'Lehann, and Tyler O'Neill. Sound design by Lauren Evans, Mark Geiney, and John Pop. To learn more or support our work, please visit DailySignal.com.