Political Crossfire over the Migrant Caravan Produces New Information on a Real Homeland Security Problem
Within the caravan or not, Middle Easterners, Bangladeshis, et al. are smuggled up through Latin America
By Todd Bensman on October 23, 2018
The fallout continues from President Donald Trump's Monday morning tweet that some "Middle Easterners" were likely among the thousands of Central Americans in the U.S.-bound migrant caravan. To my mind and the minds of many homeland security professionals who know and understand this issue, the president was obviously referencing a homeland security problem about which I often write here, "special interest aliens" (SIAs). That's government-speak for a category of U.S.-bound migrants moving along well-established Latin America smuggling routes from the countries of the Middle East, and also from South Asia and North Africa. For years, DHS agencies have tagged special interest aliens as posing a higher risk of committing terrorist acts because of the presence of Islamist terrorist organizations in some 30-plus Muslim-majority home countries.
And if Democrats, progressives, or their cable news allies want to believe this is crazy, racist, Republican fear-mongering, they'd have to somehow fit President Obama's own DHS Secretary, Jeh Johnson, into the conspiracy for putting out this memo in 2016 about the high threat of special interest aliens.
https://cis.org/Bensman/Political-Crossfire-over-Migrant-Caravan-Produces-New-Information-Real-Homeland-Security
