During Monday’s National Security Action Summit, NumbersUSA’s Rosemary Jenks, one of the nation’s foremost immigration experts, said America must better screen legal immigrants to avoid another terrorist attack.
Jenks pointed out that just this year alone, there have been “474 so-called special-interest aliens from country’s linked to terrorism” such as Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Yemen. Jenks asked how a poor person from Yemen would have the funds to come to America.
“Where do you get the money to travel to Mexico and hire a smuggler to bring you into the United States illegally?” she asked before saying it is “pretty clear there is a terrorist finance outfit behind you.”
She said too few people, though, are asking why illegal immigrants from the Middle East would go through all that trouble to sneak across the porous U.S.-Mexico border “when we will let you in with all the documents you need to remain here and plan your attack on the United States.”
Jenks pointed out that the “Blind Sheikh,” who was the mastermind behind the first Trade Center attacks in 1993, came to the country on a tourist visa, even though he was on a watch list, and then subsequently applied for asylum. She stated that another bomber who worked with the “Blind Sheikh (Omar Abdel-Rahman)” was granted amnesty as an agriculture worker, though he was a cab driver in New York. Jenks mentioned that some of the 9/11 terrorists came in on tourist and student visas, while numerous other terrorists–like bomb makers from al-Qaeda in Iraq who were caught in Kentucky–won a visa lottery.
She also noted that a man who recently was arrested for allegedly plotting to crash drone-like devices into universities came to the country on a student visa and then applied for asylum under dubious circumstances.
As Breitbart News reported, during a previous stint in jail, El Mehdi Semlali Fahti, “who entered the United States legally on a student visa,” went to the prison library and “obtained the State Department’s country reports for Morocco from 1999 to 2011.” Then, to apply for asylum, he fabricated his life’s story to make it consistent with events in Morocco during that time period.
Jenks asserted these dangerous individuals were able to sneak in because the government’s background checks consist of only checking U.S. criminal databases and a terror watch list. In other words, if a terrorist has not committed a crime in the United States and isn’t high-profile enough to be on a watch list, “we have zero capability of determining if that person is a national security threat,” Jenks said.
She noted the country does not even check the criminal history in the “alien’s home country” and mentioned that the U.S. will reportedly be resettling 7,500 Syrian refugees, many of whom she said may have family members who are fighting with ISIS and other rebel groups opposed to U.S. interests.
According to Jenks, the United States has no idea whether these Syrians want to do America harm, but the federal government will be “bringing refugees to a town near you,” so you will “find out.”
And to make matters worse, Jenks said that the USCIS is now contracting with USIS, which sloppily did background checks on Edward Snowden and the Navy Yard gunman, to help screen immigrants.
The National Security Action Summit (NSAS II) was co-sponsored by EMPAct America, Breitbart News, and the Center for Security Policy.
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