Have Terrorists Crossed Our Border?
An initial count of suspected terrorists encountered en route and at the U.S. Southwest Border Since 2001
By Todd Bensman on November 26, 2018
Todd Bensman is a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.
On several occasions in October 2018, President Donald Trump and some administration officials suggested that migrants from Middle Eastern countries might have traveled among the thousands of Hondurans in a U.S.-bound column. Later, the president stated he had "very good information" that Middle Eastern migrants had been traveling through Latin America for a number of years, independently of migrant columns, that "there could very well be" Islamic terrorists in this traffic, and that U.S. Border Patrol has intercepted "some real bad ones".1
The administration did not provide either publicly available or protected Classified and Law Enforcement Sensitive information to support the assertions, leaving them challenged and unresolved, whereas more information might have advanced discourse regarding a significant security question relevant to an ongoing national policy debate. Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, in one emblematic expression, dismissed the idea of Middle Eastern travelers through Latin America and potential terrorists among them as "pretty much a canard and a fear tactic".2
https://www.cis.org/Report/Have-Terrorists-Crossed-Our-Border