Former Acting Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Mark Morgan told Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) the terrorist attack that happened in Israel on October 7 could “absolutely” happen in the United States due to the unsecured southern border, according to the latest episode of her show viewed first by Breitbart News.
“The answer is absolutely, and this is what I keep saying,” Morgan said on Unmuted with Marsha. “You don’t have to be a border security expert to understand that we have a national security crisis happening in our southern border. It’s just common sense.”
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He added:
What happened in Israel should be a wakeup call for two very important reasons. One, it shows us that global terrorism is alive and well. Islamic extremists that that carried out these atrocities in Israel. They want to do harm to our homeland. That commitment has not changed. It is unwavering. And addition to that, it showed a colossal intelligence failure.
…
We know that May of this year, the director of the FBI during congressional testimony said he’s concerned about the southwest border as a national security threat. He told the Congress [that] Hezbollah is absolutely still committed to long-term contingency planning to do harm to the United States.
DHS just a couple of days before the October attack in Israel released an internal report that said that they are concerned that terrorist organizations are going to exploit our southern border.
Just a couple of days ago, the CBP [in] San Diego put out a similar intelligence bulletin that they’re concerned that terrorists inspired by what’s happening in Israel right now are going to exploit our southern border to do harm to our United States. And yet this administration, Senator, they’re not even acknowledging that correlation and that risk to our southern border.
Morgan said despite the threat, the Biden administration has not changed a single border policy.
“I refer to it as cognitive [dissonance] either through politics or ideology,” he said. “It prevents them from seeing the truth, reality, and fact.”
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Morgan said over the past 34 months under the Biden administration, there have been 1.6 million known “gotaways,” while at the same time there has been the highest level of apprehensions of aliens on the FBI’s terror watch list, as well as the highest level of special interest aliens at the border.
He said the special interest aliens are “individuals that come from countries that we know sponsor, facilitate, and harbor terrorism, that we know our own intelligence community has shown us, we believe pose a national security threat and risk to our country.”
He added:
In the past 34 months, we’ve seen those individuals from 180 different countries…there’s only 195 recognized countries in the face of the planet. Yet every single day we have individuals coming to our border on the terror watch list as well as special interest aliens. And the issue is how many of those terror-watchlisted people and special interest aliens are among the 1.6 million known gotaways. This is exactly why we say border security is synonymous with national security.
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Blackburn noted that in 2019, there were zero terrorist watchlist reportees apprehended at the southern border, and this year alone, there have been 169. She said in the month of October there were 30 Iranians and 35 Pakistanis. In addition, she said, “You’ve got over a hundred Russians and 2000 Chinese. These cartels are global organizations, and these people from countries that do not wish us well are coming to this southern border.”
Morgan said last month alone, CBP apprehended more aliens on the terror watch list than the previous four years combined under the Trump administration.
“Our border’s already been breached. It’s been breached for the past three years. And so it’s not a matter if the threat is going to get here, Senator. I believe the threat is already here,” he said.
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Morgan said in order to secure the border, a national emergency should be declared and U.S. military deployment to the southern border increased to immediately secure it and gain operational control.
He also said the Remain in Mexico program should be reinstated, as well as the policy to ban asylum seekers transiting through other countries to get to the U.S. He said he would end Catch-and-Release, and increase interior enforcement to allow ICE to do their jobs and remove people illegally in the U.S.
He also recommended fundamentally changing how the U.S. goes after cartels.
“How we’ve been doing it for the past 30 years if using a criminal prosecutorial method has failed. We need to go after them with the same level of commitment, tenacity, and government resources that we do terrorist organizations,” he said.
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