With the outbreak of war in the Middle East, rightwing hysteria over the U.S.-Mexico border has turned from inciting anger at migrants to stoking fear of terrorists.
“Officials apprehend two Lebanese nationals at southern border,” Fox News announced on October 13, less than a week after the attacks in Israel. The fact that the men had been detained and were being investigated as “special interest aliens” did not reassure the channel’s commentators.
“We are so stupid and so vulnerable right now,” The Five co-host Pete Hegseth said, joining a chorus of conservatives calling to shut down the border to prevent terrorists from entering the country.
It was the same thing after 9/11. People’s fear and anger over what happened quickly focused on the border. Even as far back as 1991, during the first Gulf War, there was a rumor that I wrote about for The Nation at the time that thirty Iraqi terrorists were planning to sneak into the United States on camels.
Over the past three decades, 9/11 and other terror attacks have been used as justification for a vast increase in security along the Mexican border. Billions have been spent on agents, walls, surveillance technology, and other measures. The crackdown has resulted in thousands of deaths of innocent migrants, devastating environmental destruction and what many locals view as excessive militarization of their communities and numerous violations of their civil and human rights.
There is only one problem with all this: None of the 9/11 terrorists—or any other foreign perpetrator of a terrorist attack before or since—entered the United States through the southern border.
I’m not saying the threat isn’t real. Terrorists exist and they need to be identified and stopped. But judging by the statistics, if any potential terrorists have tried to enter the United States over the land border from Mexico, they have failed.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), in the past year, 151 individuals apprehended at the southern border turned out to be on an FBI database of known or suspected terrorists and their associates. The list is broad and includes people and their family members suspected of being connected to rebel groups in Colombia and other Western Hemisphere nations not known to target Americans. None were reported to be members of Hamas, al-Qaeda, or ISIS.
While 151 represents an increase over previous years (ninety-eight were caught in 2022, and just fifteen in 2021) it is still only 0.01 percent of all those attempting to cross the border last year—a number that has also sharply increased since 2021.
The CBP statistics reveal that people coming in from Canada were about twice as likely to be on the list, despite far fewer numbers of apprehensions. There were more than 430 matches with the terror watchlist on the Canadian border in fiscal 2023, most of which occurred at ports of entry. (On the Mexican border, an additional seventy-six people with database matches were caught at the ports of entry).
Not only is this obsession with the Mexican border diverting us from the apparent greater risk of terrorists entering from Canada, it’s distracting us from learning from 9/11 about who terrorists are and how they operate.
All nineteen of the 9/11 hijackers, for example, entered the country through major airports on valid tourist and student visas. Some left and returned to the US more than a dozen times in the months and years before September 2001. Four were studying at flight schools in Arizona and Florida. (Their lack of interest in learning to land a plane was one of numerous missed clues as to their intentions).
Clues missed, signals ignored, lies on visa applications undetected—all of these were among the intelligence failures that led to 9/11. It’s possible that our efforts to criminalize every undocumented immigrant may have contributed to those failures. As a 9/11 Commission staff statement said:
“As long as the top enforcement priorities were removal of criminal aliens and prosecution of employers who hired illegal aliens, a major counterterrorism effort would not have been possible. This is not to pass judgment on immigration policy generally. What we can do is highlight the way those policy choices affected counterterrorism efforts before 9/11, and potentially affect them today.”
Terrorists are typically well-financed. To catch them, we need excellent cybersecurity and better screening of people who seek to enter the country legally. We also should focus more on domestic terrorists, including mass shooters, as we are far more likely to be killed by them. And we need to crack down on the availability of guns to people who wish to kill us, regardless of their motives.
If we want to spend money on the border, instead of more walls, we should hire more staff and install better technology at the ports of entry to increase the accuracy and thoroughness of inspections. We also need more humanitarian aid workers to care for and help process migrants when they arrive. That would help free up border patrol agents to go after any terrorists who might be coming across the desert on camels.