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illegal immigration

Exclusive Interview: Panama Border Security Chief Says Many U.S.-Bound Terror Suspects Caught in Darien Gap Region

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1 month ago

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SENAFRONT Director General Jorge Gabea at his headquarters office in Panama City, August 2024. Photo by Todd Bensman.

From the Center for Immigration Studies

By Todd Bensman 

The bad news: The migrant flood prompted by Biden-Harris policies means only a tiny fraction can be checked

PANAMA CITY, Panama — In April 2022, the American public finally heard the sound of national security alarms about the U.S. southern border, when U.S. Customs and Border Protection began publishing, on a monthly basis, the numbers of FBI watch-listed terrorists caught illegally crossing (a record-breaking 378 from FY2021 through July 2024).

But what most Americans do not know is that many more terrorism suspects en route to the U.S. border could be added to that alarming number, except these ones were caught in Panama coming out of the notorious Darien Gap jungle, pulled off the migrant trails, and never accounted for in CBP’s public data reports.

New official information about these additional terrorism suspects interrupted on their way to the American border comes by way of an exclusive Center for Immigration Studies interview with the chief of Panama’s National Border Service (SENAFRONT), Director General Jorge Gabea, at agency headquarters just off the Panama Canal.

Asked to comment about SENAFRONT’s reported August arrest of three Afghan terror suspects whose biometrics were taken and checked at a Darien Province immigrant reception station (described in the SENAFRONT tweet below), Gabea responded that the report was “not fake”.

Three Afghan terrorists and three Colombians with criminal records are detected through profiling actions and biometric tests at the Lajas Blancas Temporary Immigration Reception Station in Darién. #CentinelasDeLaPatria

“We did take and profile a few members of a terrorist cell from … Afghanistan,” he said. “We linked and we profiled them to be members of an active cell. They were members of a Salafist group, and they had links with different activities.”

But then Gabea added that this was far from a one-off.

“We have many stories of that. We don’t just have one. We have many stories of that, from Somalia, from Yemen … from Syria, from Africa.”

Gabea would not put a number on the “many stories”.

But for all those good-news stories of short-circuited U.S. border-crossings by known terrorist suspects, he also suggested that the record-breaking flood hundreds of thousands of migrants a year from 150-plus nations that began pouring through the Darien Gap from Colombia in 2021 has severely hampered the very counterterrorism screening programs that catch them and get them off the trails early.

”3 Percent in This Moment” — The Broken Counterterrorism Dam. I knew exactly what Gabea was talking about. Following a previous trip to Panama in 2018, I produced reporting about those counterterrorism programs. This was several years before the historic mass migration event that the Biden-Harris administration would unleash starting in 2021. (See 2019 video below.)

Since 2011, SENAFRONT has worked closely with in-country FBI and DHS agents on counterterrorism programs that use U.S.-provided equipment to collect migrant biometrics like fingerprints and photos and run them through terrorism databases looking for positive hits before the foreign nationals move on north.

But SENAFRONT’s director general indicated that so many began coming through the gap during the historic mass migration to the U.S. border that Central American authorities are scarcely able to screen even a fraction of them.

“Maybe at this moment … we can check like 3 percent and, in the worst moment, 1 percent,” Gabea told me. “We don’t have the capability to screen everybody.”

So many are coming that agents on the ground are left to “profile” immigrants for priority collection and checks, probably meaning if they are young men from Muslim-majority nations. But eyeballing always eludes perfection.

”Throughout the Years, We Were Catching a Lot … Hundreds.” This profound reduction in coverage to 1 percent or 3 percent in Panama stands in contrast with a 90-percent rate of screening immigrants in the country when the program started in 2011, when flows were usually well under 10,000 per year.

This is according to Edward Dolan, a former Homeland Security Investigations agent who worked deeply with these programs while later serving as DHS’s Regional Attache for Central America in the U.S. embassy in Panama City. Dolan retired from service in 2019 but still lives and works in Panama, where I met with him in a coffee shop.

“Throughout the years, we were catching a lot” of watch-listed terrorists, Dolan told me. “From like 2015 to 2019, it was hundreds.”

But checking the 550,000 immigrants that crossed in just 2023 and almost 250,000 so far in 2024?

“That’s insurmountable,” Dolan said. “I can’t imagine trying to manage what they have now.”

Dolan said those low screening rates in Panama help explain the record-high number of terror suspects getting caught and counted illegally crossing the U.S. border.

“All you have to do is look at what’s being reported at the southwest border and then go back and look at the numbers in 2019 [zero] and 2020 [three],” Dolan said. “That tells the story itself.”

Delayed Counterterrorism Responses from Colombia to Texas. So many are coming in through the Darien Gap, Gabea confirmed, that “active terrorist” migrants are sometimes mistakenly freed to proceed to countries north before biometric information submitted in Panama produces a positive hit.

A red flag goes out then, of course, and with a little luck, “they take them from the migrant flow”, Gabea explained, for interviews with American and local agents, the eventual deportation to “their official port of entry. Maybe it’s in Africa. Maybe it’s Bosnia. We return them to their previous position.”

Clearly, however, many are too long gone and don’t get caught until they hit the American border, if ever. On August 5, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee issued an interim report revealing that since January 2021, CPB released into the United States “at least” 99 border-crossing immigrants who were on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist database.

The entire multinational counterterrorism net now stands reduced in capability, and the bad guys know it, Dolan said.

“If you’re a terrorist,” he said. “this is how you’re going to come to the United States.”

The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization founded in 1985. It is the nation’s only think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy analysis of the economic, social, demographic, fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on the United States.

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Daily Caller

Musk Reveals To Tucker Why He Thinks 2024 Will Be Last Election If Dems Win

Published on October 8, 2024

By

From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

 

By Nicole Silverio

Tech billionaire Elon Musk said Monday that he believes Democrats will eliminate swing states if they are re-elected in the 2024 election.

Musk said during an interview with Daily Caller News Foundation co-founder Tucker Carlson that Democrats will legalize the status of illegal immigrants, which will in turn allow them to become citizens and vote in future elections. He said that this scenario would turn the U.S. into a “single party country,” as the illegal immigrants voting in elections will largely back Democratic candidates.

“My prediction is if there’s another 4 years of a [Democrat] administration, they will legalize so many illegals that are there that the next election there won’t be any swing states,” Musk told Carlson. “And we’ll be a single party country just like California is a single party state. It’s a super majority Dem state in California.”

The tech mogul said there will not be another election if Republican nominee Donald Trump does not win in November, causing him to endorse and support the former president.

“My view is that if Trump doesn’t win this election, it’s the last election we’re gonna have,” Musk said. “That the Dem machine has been importing so many people, bringing in so many illegals … they’re transporting large numbers of illegals to swing states. If you look at the numbers, these are the numbers from the government website, so like from the Democrat administrative government website … and there are triple digit numbers of illegals to all the swing states and in some cases, it’s 700% in the last three years.”

Musk further criticized California’s new law banning local governments from requiring voter identification.

The D.C. Council passed the “Local Resident Voting Rights Amendment Act” in 2022 to allow non-citizens to cast ballots in local elections. House Democrats urged members in May to oppose a Republican-led bill to bar the city government from allowing illegal immigrants to vote in local elections.

House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN’s Jake Tapper in September that several states, including swing states, have found “thousands of non-citizens” are registered to vote, warning these illegal votes could “determine the outcome of the [2024] election.” Trump and Johnson discussed drafting legislation to require proof of citizenship in order to register to vote in April, NBC News reported.

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illegal immigration

Bombshell report: ‘High risk noncitizens’ without IDs flying across U.S.

Published on October 3, 2024

By

From The Center Square

By Bethany Blankley 

Feds don’t know how many noncitizens were released into US without identification

Twenty-three years after Islamic terrorists used airplanes to conduct the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, the federal agency created to protect Americans from national security threats “cannot ensure they are keeping high-risk noncitizens without identification from entering the country.”

The potentially high-risk noncitizens are being flown on domestic flights without identification, creating a public safety risk, according to the latest Office of Inspector General report assessing several federal agencies within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The OIG has repeatedly published reports identifying potential national security risks created by Biden-Harris policies identified within DHS and its subagencies.

In the latest redacted report that has “sensitive security information,” the OIG expressed concerns about Americans’ public safety to the administrators of the Transportation Security Administration, US Customs and Border Protection, and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“Under current processes, CBP and ICE cannot ensure they are keeping high-risk noncitizens without identification from entering the country. Additionally, TSA cannot ensure its vetting and screening procedures prevent high-risk noncitizens who may pose a threat to the flying public from boarding domestic flights.”

The report states the agencies didn’t assess risks to public safety by releasing non-citizens into the United States without identification and putting them on domestic flights.

The OIG requested data on the number of noncitizens without identification who were released into the United States from fiscal years 2021 through 2023. “Because immigration officers are not required to document whether a noncitizen presented identification in the databases,” the data the OIG obtained “may be incomplete.”

“Therefore, neither CBP nor ICE could determine how many of the millions of noncitizens seeking entry in the United States each year entered without identification and whose self-reported biographic information was accepted,” the report states. CBP and ICE officers interviewed by the OIG “acknowledged the risks of allowing noncitizens without identification into the country, yet neither CBP nor ICE conducted a comprehensive risk assessment for these noncitizens to assess the level of risk these individuals present and developed corresponding mitigation measures,” the report states.

One of the primary responsibilities of CBP and ICE is to verify noncitizens’ identities prior to seeking entry; TSA is responsible for screening everyone who boards domestic flights. The OIG audited them to determine to what extent CBP and ICE policies and procedures confirmed individual’s identities “for the documents TSA accepts for domestic travel and whether TSA ensures noncitizens traveling on domestic flights provide proof of identification consistent with all other domestic travelers.”

As Border Patrol officials have explained, the majority of illegal border crossers are not vetted and released with DHS papers. The OIG confirms this, stating CBP and ICE officers accept “self-reported biographical information, which they use to issue various immigration forms. Once in the United States, noncitizens can travel on domestic flights.”

The OIG also notes that noncitizens do not have TSA-acceptable identification but “are allowed to board domestic flights.” TSA requires them “to undergo vetting and additional screening,” which involves running their information through systems to validate information on DHS–issued immigration forms and conducting additional screening procedures like pat downs.

“TSA’s vetting and screening procedures do not eliminate the risk that noncitizens who may pose a threat to fellow passengers could board domestic flights,” the OIG report says.

It gets worse, the OIG says.

“Under current processes, CBP and ICE cannot ensure they are keeping high-risk noncitizens without identification from entering the country. Additionally, TSA cannot ensure its vetting and screening procedures prevent high-risk noncitizens who may pose a threat to the flying public from boarding domestic flights.”

The 37-page redacted report details the procedures that must be followed according to federal law and notes in bold: “CBP and ICE have policies and procedures for screening noncitizens, but neither component knows how many noncitizens without identification documents are released into the country.”

Security issues also exist with the CBP One app, which has been used to fast track over 813,000 inadmissible illegal foreign nationals into the country, The Center Square reported.

These issues are redacted. “Because of CBP’s and ICE’s process for inspecting and releasing noncitizens, TSA’s methods to screen for individuals who pose a threat would not necessarily prevent these individuals from boarding flights,” the OIG warns.

It also points out that it has released previous reports where its office “documented similar weaknesses in CBP’s screening processes that allowed high-risk individuals into the country,” including those on the terrorist watchlist.

It concludes, “If CBP and ICE continue to allow noncitizens – whose identities immigration officers cannot confirm – to enter the country, they may inadvertently increase national security risks.”

The agencies did not concur with the OIG’s findings. In response, the OIG, as prescribed by a DHS directive, gave them 90 days to respond and provide corrective action that would be taken as well as a target completion date for each recommendation.

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