WELCOME BACK TO SEPTEMBER TENTH

Those of us old enough to remember the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, also remember the day before. It was a different world.

On September 10, 2001, mainland America had never suffered a surprise attack. There was no reason to expect it ever would. That all changed the next day.

Somehow, we’ve come back full circle to that attitude of complacency.

The horror of 9/11 has apparently become a distant memory for the  Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security. Its website says there are no current terrorism advisories. Nothing to see here.

On the other hand, the head of the FBI says the danger has never been greater. 

FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to Congress in March that the threat of a terrorist attack on America has gone to “a whole other level.”

“I’d be hard-pressed to think of a time when so many different threats to our public safety and national security were so elevated all at once,” Wray testified.

Wray says the danger is greater than ever because our border has been wide-open like never before.

That’s basically the same conclusion made two weeks later by Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost and numerous law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and other local officials when I hosted a forum on Border Insecurity in the city of Independence.

As I wrote in On The Record in June, our porous border has made the danger greater than ever, and disaster is certain if we don’t close Biden’s wide-open border.

"It’s frightening, and we’re headed for another 9/11," said Democrat and New York City Councilman Robert Holden that same month.

“It’s only a matter of time before one of these individuals connected to a terrorist group is involved in something devastating on U.S. soil, and this administration will be responsible,” said Homeland Security Chairman Mark E. Green, MD (R-TN).

President Trump called it, “A catastrophe waiting to happen.”

He cited a “record number of terrorists coming into our country and a 100% chance that there will be a major terrorist attack in the United States.”

The next devastating terrorist attack could happen anywhere, even Ohio, now that so many illegal immigrants have settled in so many states in such large numbers.

We simply don’t know how many terrorists have crossed our unguarded  Southern Border in the last three-and-a-half years, or what weapons they may have brought with them. 

They could have brought anything from a suitcase nuke to vials of smallpox or the Ebola virus.

According to the House Committee on Homeland Security, the Border Patrol has encountered a stunning and unprecedented 10 million illegal border crossers during less than four years of the Biden administration. An estimated two million “gotaways” evaded the Border Patrol.

That would be a total of 12 million. President Trump estimates 18 million illegal immigrants have entered the country under Biden. But, for arguments sake, let’s consider the lower number.

Say that just a mere 1 percent of those 12 million illegal immigrants are terrorists.

That’s still 120,000 terrorists.

That’s almost twice as many as the number of soldiers in the British Army.

Remember, it only took 19 terrorists to take down the twin towers and to attack the Pentagon on 9/11.

The potential for widespread devastation is enormous.

Since FBI Director Wray sounded the alarm in March, the situation has grown more dire.

It’s no longer speculative – we have proof the world’s most dangerous terrorists have entered our country.

We don’t really know how many or where they are – we just know they are already here.

Federal agents arrested eight terror suspects from Tajikistan with ties to ISIS in June. A wiretap revealed they discussed bombs.

Six of the suspects had crossed the border illegally but were allowed into the country because vetting did not turn up any negative information.

By April, Wray had begun warning about the new terror group, ISIS-K. That stands for for Islamic State Khorasan, a region which includes parts of Iran, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. ISIS-K is described as even more extreme than ISIS, if you can believe it.

Members of that group, citizens of Tajikistan, had carried out a terror attack in Moscow a few weeks before that killed 145 people and wounded hundreds more.

Wray warned the potential for the same kind of attack in America was “increasingly concerning.”

Then came the bombshell report. 

DHS announced more than 400 illegal immigrants had been imported  into America by a smuggling network run by ISIS – one that sounded just like Wray’s description of ISIS-K.

150 had been arrested but the location of more than 50 remained unknown. Authorities believe they know where 200 more are located in 17 states.

The DHS had let them all into the country because none were on a terror watchlist.

In a spectacular understatement, the DHS Office of Inspector General said in a report, “The Department of Homeland Security’s technology, procedures, and coordination were not fully effective to screen and vet non-citizens applying for admission into the United States.”

Homeland Security Chairman Mark E. Green, MD (R-TN) responded,

"The Biden administration’s open-borders policies represent an unprecedented threat to America’s national security. 

Over 370 individuals on the terrorist watchlist have been apprehended attempting to illegally cross our Southwest border between ports of entry since the beginning of Fiscal Year (FY) 2021—an increase of more than 2,000 percent compared to all of FY2017-2020. 

Individuals from more than 160 countries have been apprehended crossing the border illegally, including aliens from countries on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. 

The Committee has documented how DHS’ claims about screening and vetting of inadmissible border crossers are largely meaningless."

Even the uber-leftist editorial board of the Washington Post is freaking out over the danger. Associate editor and columnist David Ignatius called it a terror time bomb.

He described how, ”FBI Director Christopher A. Wray has been delivering hair-on-fire warnings about this problem for months,” and that, “the awful truth is that they don’t know what’s out there. America, with its porous border, is vulnerable to the stream of people who enter the country every day.”

Consider this, all of the Sept. 11 hijackers were in the country legally, mostly on tourist or business visas.

A visa is no longer required.

Any terrorist can just walk across our border and disappear.

Or, if apprehended, just apply for asylum status….and disappear.

No one will come looking for you for years.  If ever.

As Yost explained during the On The Record podcast following the Border Insecurity forum I hosted in March, any illegal immigrant can now enter the country legally by merely claiming political asylum:

“You're allowed into the country, you're assigned a date then for a hearing, and the majority of these people don't show up for a date and disappear into the countryside.”

That includes ISIS-K members who don’t show up on watchlists because the government had never heard of them until a few weeks ago.

My previous observation, unfortunately, is even more true on this Sept. 11 than when I made it back in June – so long as our chief executive does not execute the law or craft policies that work, I fear the worst.

Jerry Cirino represents Ohio Senate District 18
@SenatorCirino
www.ohiosenate.gov/cirino