Editor’s note: Peter Bergen is a national security analyst for CNN, vice president of New America, professor of practice at Arizona State University, and host of the Audible Podcast.in the room” is also on apple and spotify. He is the author of “.The rise and fall of Osama bin Laden” The views expressed in this commentary are his own.read more opinion On CNN.
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Last weekend, former President Donald Trump spoke out about the southern border on his Truth Social platform, claiming that “terrorists are flowing unchecked from all over the world.” Currently, he has a 100% chance of a major terrorist attack occurring in the United States. Close the borders! ”
President Trump is already in election mode and knows that the southern border is a weak spot for President Joe Biden. Trump also certainly remembers that conflating terrorism and immigration was a winner in the 2016 election — remember the “Muslim ban”? So why not revisit this election-proven policy?
But is Trump right? Take his first claim that terrorists are flowing into the United States from all over the world. If this is true, wouldn’t it be big news? When a terrorist is arrested somewhere in the United States, the media focuses on such stories, as in the case of an Uzbek man sentenced to life in prison for his role in the Manhattan terrorist attack that killed eight people last year. to report on.
Strangely, we don’t hear about terrorist attacks across the United States by people who invaded the southern border. It must be downstream media protecting terrorists!
In fact, what President Trump appears to be referring to are U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics on border encounters with people on the U.S. terrorist watch list. To be clear, being on this terrorist watch list does not mean you are a terrorist.
According to a CBS News investigation last year, there are currently about 2 million people on terrorist watch lists, but this could simply mean that someone has unspecified ties to terrorism for reasons the government won’t make public. It means that you suspect that it is sexual.
In fiscal year 2023, there were 249 Border Patrol encounters with people on the U.S. terrorist watch list at the southern border, while nearly twice that number, 487 total, occurred at the U.S.-Canada border. . But no one is advocating building a wall across the Canadian border because of concerns that terrorists are pouring across America’s northern border.
In fact, the last true terrorist arrest at the U.S. land border was in 1999. Ahmed Ressam had a trunk full of explosives in his car, where he was heading to LAX airport to detonate his bomb. He drove from Canada and was arrested at a border crossing in Port Angeles, Washington.
Fear-mongering reports about terrorists pouring across our southern border misrepresent where the terrorist threat in the United States primarily originates. Since 9/11, there has been only one deadly terrorist attack in the United States by a foreign national with ties to a terrorist group. In 2019, a Saudi military officer who was communicating with al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen killed three U.S. sailors in Yemen. Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida. Rather than crossing Panama’s dangerous Darien Canyon, the Saudi officer crossed the southern border into Mexico. He had entered the United States legally two years earlier.
The vast majority of terrorist attacks carried out in the United States since 9/11 have been carried out by American citizens or permanent residents, and none have had to cross the southern border because they were already in the United States. The group is epitomized by Omar Mateen, who was inspired by ISIS to kill 49 people at a Florida nightclub in 2016. Mateen is a U.S. citizen and was born in Queens, New York.
The greatest terrorist threat in the United States in recent years is A report last year from the U.S. Government Accountability Office said they were not the work of jihadist terrorists like Mateen, but far-right terrorists motivated by racial or ethnic hatred or anti-government sentiment. . These terrorists are US citizens, not immigrants.
In 2019, in the deadliest right-wing terrorist attack in decades, a 21-year-old white man shot and killed 23 people, believed to be Hispanic immigrants, at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. In a manifesto posted online by the terrorist, he cited what he called a “Hispanic invasion” as the basis for the killings. Trump’s own rhetoric About the influx of immigrants coming across the southern border.
The most disturbing act of domestic terrorism in recent decades was the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol in which about 140 police officers were assaulted, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Since then, more than 1,200 people have been charged with federal crimes, ranging from relatively minor offenses such as trespassing to more serious offenses such as assaulting a police officer. About 900 of them have either pleaded guilty or been sentenced, according to an Associated Press analysis.
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The rioters at the Capitol were among Trump’s supporters who responded to his call to come to Washington, even though he knew some of the rally attendees were armed. , ordered them to march to the Capitol. He passively watched television coverage of the riot for hours before President Trump intervened to try to stop it.
Trump told CNN at City Hall last year that the riot he helped incite at the Capitol was “a great day,” but in reality it was one of the saddest events in the history of our republic. Trump promised that if elected president again, he would pardon “the majority” of the rioters.
When it comes to acts of terrorism, it may be incumbent upon President Trump to take a hard look in the mirror, rather than mistakenly focusing his attention on the southern border.