Podcast: Terrorist Entry Through the Southwest Border

Mark Krikorian; Todd Bensman

By Mark Krikorian and Todd Bensman on September 21, 2023

Listen to "Terrorist Entry Through the Southwest Border" on Spreaker.

Summary

In this week's podcast are excerpts from a recent hearing of the House immigration subcommittee on “Terrorist Entry Through the Southwest Border.” The hearing examined, “the national security implications of the Department of Homeland Security's open-borders agenda, including how the Biden Administration's policies have led to record-high encounters of aliens on the Terrorist Watchlist as well as the mass release of unvetted aliens into U.S. communities.”

Todd Bensman, the Center’s Senior National Security Fellow, was the first witness. In his statement, he explains how the current immigration crisis at the southwest border has elevated and exacerbated the homeland security threat of terrorist border infiltration to discomfiting levels.

Two other witnesses based their testimony on their first-hand experience in law enforcement:

Charles Marino, former Senior Law Enforcement Advisor, U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Rodney Scott, former chief of the U.S. Border Patrol.

Mark Krikorian, the Center’s executive director and host of Parsing Immigration Policy, moderates this rebroadcast of the Center's panel.

In his closing commentary, Krikorian discusses a new report by Todd Bensman entitled, “New Records: Biden DHS Has Approved Hundreds of Thousands of Migrants for Secretive Foreign Flights Directly into U.S. Airports.” This report uses DHS data, gained through the Freedom of Information Act, on a little-known part of the CBP One program to rechannel potential illegal border-crossers which allows certain inadmissible aliens to skip the border altogether and take commercial passenger flights from foreign countries straight to cities in the American interior.