Illegals from Afghanistan claim to be Mexican

A former senior supervisor and manager for the Immigration and Naturalization Service says it's curious that so many people from nations where terrorism is rampant, such as Afghanistan, take on another national identity when they cross the border illegally into the United States.

"Why would individuals seek nationality in countries plagued by poverty and violence if that's what they seek to escape?" wrote Dan Cadman at the Center for Immigration Studies on Monday.

"One answer might be that they wish to gain proximity to the U.S. border while masking their origins," he said of research that found that hundreds of illegal border crossers were linked to a variety of other nations, even though they all "are Afghans by birth."

He said of the illegal crossers caught during fiscal 2013 alone, those who were Afghan by birth but identified by other nationalities included 268 purportedly from Mexico, 10 from Honduras, eight from Guatemala, two from El Salvador and one each from Colombia, Costa Rica, Ireland, Nicaragua and Pakistan.

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The research cited by Cadman, a former INS/ICE official with 30 years of government experience, came just as the issue of terrorists crossing into the U.S. through the porous southern border with Mexico has become a point of contention.

As WND reported Tuesday, the Washington Post's "Fact Checker" column charged a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate falsely claimed the jihadist group ISIS was collaborating with Mexican drug cartels. The Oct. 9 column by the Post's ombudsman, Glenn Kessler, gave "Four Pinocchios" to Rep. Tom Cotton, R-Ark, who is in a potential upset election that could unseat Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark.

Kessler cited Cotton's statement at a tele-town hall Sept. 29.

"We now know that it's a security problem. Groups like the Islamic State collaborate with drug cartels in Mexico who have clearly shown they’re willing to expand outside the drug trade into human trafficking and potentially even terrorism," Cotton said. "They could infiltrate our defenseless border and attack us right here in places like Arkansas."

Kessler wrote that he traced the statement by Cotton, which he called of "dubious provenance," to a July 4 WND story that quoted WND senior staff writer and former Defense Department analyst Michael Maloof.

Maloof had said ISIS "may be working to infiltrate" the U.S. with the aid of transnational drug cartels, citing the violent Mexican criminal gang MS-13 as a highly likely candidate for the partnership.

"MS-13 already are in over 1,100 U.S. cities, and, as a consequence, the infiltration capabilities are very, very high and the threat from them can be sooner rather than later," Maloof said in the July 4 story.

Maloof 'very reliable'

Richard Perle, a political adviser, consultant and lobbyist who was assistant secretary of Defense under President Reagan, told WND that Maloof's analyses have been "very reliable."

"He's not known to make wild statements," he said.

Perle, now at the American Enterprise Institute, told WND the bigger point is that it's only logic that would dictate concern over terrorists coming into the U.S. from Mexico.

"It seems to me pretty obvious that our southern border clearly is not impenetrable," he told WND. "I don't see how anyone could rule out terrorists taking advantage. … I don't believe the idea is at all outlandish."

Perle noted terrorist who want to enter via air travel face security, but "there are thousands a week coming across the southern border."

"Seems to me to be sort of obvious that [some] could be terrorists," he said.

Southern gateway

Cadman, whose expertise includes areas of criminal aliens and national security and terrorism matters, noted that the federal government seems "to have been blind to the rise of ISIS until it had captured a swath of territory and declared itself a 'caliphate.'"

"But the question still remains: Is it within the realm of reasonable possibility that extremists have used our southern border as a gateway to the interior, as so many hundreds of thousands of individuals have done?"

Cadman said he thinks there is cause for concern.

"In the course of reviewing 11 years worth of removals data provided by ICE as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request filed by a journalist, I noticed something that is both interesting and disturbing: I detected certain clusters of aliens born in what used to be called 'special interest countries' who were apprehended crossing the southern border into the United States, but who had obtained citizenship from Mexico and certain Central and South American countries."

He said Afghanis choosing to identify as other nationalities raises questions.

One is that "Afghanistan is so treacherous, so deadly that even allegedly vetted soldiers and police routinely attack and kill U.S. and allied troops in so-called 'green on blue' attacks."

"These entrants represent a risk because we do not know whether they truly value their adopted country of citizenship or are extremists who simply see it as a tool because of the relative freedom of travel that it brings," he wrote.

"Can I assert that these illegal border crossers were/are Islamist in thinking, or bent on violence? I cannot. But traditional methods of examining border apprehensions look heavily at the nationality of aliens in assessing trends and conducting risk analysis. When an Afghan-by-birth/Mexican-by-naturalization is examined statistically, he simply shows up as 'Mexican' along with the tens of thousands of other Mexicans caught trying to enter the United States. There is some likelihood that such persons will not stand out as a metric, and therefore the risk they pose will either be minimized or perhaps even overlooked."

A law enforcement officer in Texas says he's prepared to deal with terrorists encroaching on sovereign U.S. soil.

Sheriff Gary Painter told KMID-TV in Midland, Texas: "These people have said they're going to take over, they're going to strike, they're going to hit. ... If it happens, we're going to handle it, I can promise you that. I have no doubt, that if any of these fools show up we'll be glad to take care of them."

WND reported the Washington watchdog organization Judicial Watch said its sources had evidence of the presence of ISIS factions in Mexico. The organization recently doubled down on its claim.

In a weekly blog update, Judicial Watch said: "There are times when all of us hate to say, 'I told you so.' And the latest news from Judicial Watch on the apprehension of ISIS terrorists on the U.S.-Mexico border is certainly one of them."

Judicial Watch said after its early reporting on the presence of terrorists, "the Obama spin machine cranked up" as a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security denied the report, and a DHS official "duplicitously" said, "I haven't seen that at all."

"At Judicial Watch, we pulled no punches in standing by our story," the organization said, adding the government's denial constituted a "non-denial denial."

The group said the evidence is clear, pointing, for example, to two men in American jails for partnering "to plan a Chicago truck bombing that was thwarted" and then also planning bombings at oil refineries.

"The recent, seemingly unrelated, arrests … expose the nexus of Islamic terror and drug cartel trafficking operating from El Paso," Judicial Watch said, referring to the Texas border city.

Mike Baker, a former covert operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, said recently on Laura Ingraham's radio show there is "a lot of communication" between ISIS and the drug cartels, just as there has been with al-Qaida.

"We've had good intel over the years about al-Qaida, about their efforts to coordinate with, as an example, Mexican cartels … in an effort to try to exploit our southern border," Baker said.

He added that the cartels are a business.

"If there's a revenue stream they can exploit, then they will, and the extremists understand that."

ABC reported a photo that appears to show an image of an ISIS flag in front of the White House was found on the Web. It showed a hand holding up an image of an ISIS flag  displayed on a smartphone on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House fence.

It was tweeted from an apparently pro-ISIS Twitter handle @sunna_rev on Aug. 9.

The message said: "We are in your state We are in your cities We are in your streets."

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