OPINION:
Since Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. counterterrorism efforts have largely enjoyed bipartisan support. Though the security of our southern border dominates headlines, Americans on both sides of the aisle continue to prioritize counterterrorism efforts holistically, including on our border.
Unfortunately, the Biden-Harris administration has failed to deliver on this bipartisan tradition, implementing policies that have led to no less than 13 million illegal encounters along the southern border since 2021, including a massive influx of people from areas (the Caucasus, the Middle East, Venezuela, etc.) and demographics (young men, not family units) of significant concern for terrorist risk.
This volume and threat profile has placed nearly insurmountable time and resource constraints on the already under-resourced men and women of Customs and Border Protection, making a full vetting of arrivals at the southern border impossible.
The raw data, qualitative analysis by respected thinkers, testimony from leading national security professionals and recent arrests of potential terrorist actors demonstrate that the border security policies of the Biden-Harris administration have brought the disturbing threat of terrorist and cartel convergence to our doorstep.
The concept of convergence — that terrorist and criminal networks may overlap in enough places and functions (i.e., money laundering or smuggling) that they begin to leverage each other’s resources and capabilities — has long been a concern for counterterrorism professionals. We have concrete examples of convergence abroad, from Africa to the Caucasus, from the Islamic State group to Al-Shabaab.
Convergence threats here at home, however, are often dismissed as inconclusive or premature. Indeed, CNN described them as a “conservative dog whistle” over the summer. But the facts are irrefutable: The failed leadership of the past 3½ years has enabled the convergence of individual terrorist affiliates — and potentially terror groups — with transnational criminal organizations operating along our southern border.
Quantitatively, between port-of-entry hits against the Terrorist Screening Data Set — the nation’s primary terrorist watchlist — have grown from three encounters in 2020 to 16, 98, 172 and 106 encounters, respectively, in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
A watchlist hit in this context means that at least one piece of information about a foreign national attempting to cross the border illegally was linked to intelligence associated with terrorist activities as diverse as financing, smuggling, planning and operations.
Qualitatively, Harvard University professor Graham Allison and former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell recently declared in Foreign Affairs that “the terrorism warning lights are blinking red again.” In their piece, they reference striking statements from FBI Director Christoper Wray, Gen. Erik Kurilla, commander of the U.S. Central Command, and others about the heightened terrorism threats at home and abroad.
In open-source reporting, specific and credible foreign terrorist threats to the homeland came to light this past summer. In what one former colleague described as “the most concerning terrorist threat I have seen,” foreign nationals with Islamic State group affiliations were paroled into the U.S. despite their publicly espoused extremist beliefs.
The decision to arrest and remove these eight Tajiks under Immigration and Customs Enforcement authority — rather than continuing to surveil them for intelligence purposes — is a strong indicator they represented an imminent threat. Open-source reporting also identified examples of Uzbek nationals with potential ties to Islamic State — Khorasan province smuggling migrants across the southern border.
While we are not privy to today’s discussions of national security decisions made by current policymakers, we can look at the facts. We know that each of the three Terrorist Screening Data Set encounters we faced in 2019 created days of emergency work to identify and mitigate the potential threat.
The 278 encounters in the past two years alone feel almost insurmountable despite knowing firsthand that CBP personnel are among our nation’s hardest-working and most dedicated civil servants, constantly implementing new vetting capabilities and innovating in the counterterrorism space.
This knowledge, amplified by the alarming arrests highlighted above and the recent release of CBP’s 2024 between the port-of-entry TSDS numbers (106), requires a clear statement from a counterterrorism perspective: Vice President Kamala Harris’ open-border policies have become a physical threat to us all. Her tenure as vice president — including ownership of the border portfolio — has coincided with if not enabled the terrorist and transnational criminal organization convergence along our southern border.
Twenty-three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the men and women of our national security community and all Americans deserve better.
We must acknowledge the threat posed by the convergence of criminal and terrorist actors along the southern border and the quantifiable degree to which Ms. Harris has enabled this threat. We must do so with moral clarity and intellectual integrity in our social discourse, including in public reporting.
More importantly, we must do it at the ballot box. At this stage, the analysis is clear: Four more years of open-border policies are likely to make a foreign terrorist attack on our homeland almost inevitable.
• Chad Wolf is the former acting secretary of homeland security and executive director of the America First Policy Institute. Thomas K. Plofchan III served as counterterrorism and intelligence counselor to the commissioner at U.S. Customs and Border Protection and senior counselor for counterterrorism at the Department of Homeland Security.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.