Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned that the U.S. faces a “heightened” terror threat, largely due to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, and further compounded by the open U.S. southern border.
“We are definitely in a heightened threat environment, and we are proceeding with vigilance,” Secretary Mayorkas told CNN on Wednesday.
Federal agencies first announced that they were implementing increased vigilance when a former head and founding member of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas called on Arabs and Muslims to participate in protests in a “Day of Jihad” on October 13. Though no reported violence was carried out in the U.S. in connection to the former Hamas leader’s statements, a teacher was killed and two other individuals were injured in France by who is believed to be a 20-year-old male suspect “known for his ties to radical Islam.”
Secretary Mayorkas’ statement echoed that of FBI director Christopher Wray, who, during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, said that he has never “seen a time where all the threats, or so many of the threats, are all elevated, all at exactly the same time.”
During the hearing, Senator Lindsey Graham asked Wray, “So, blinking red lights analogy about 9/11 — all the lights were blinking red before 9/11, apparently, obviously, all of us missed it. Would you say there’s multiple blinking red lights out there?”
Wray told the Senator that he is seeing “blinking red lights everywhere.”
Border Patrol agents with first-hand knowledge of America’s illegal immigration crisis appear to share the Director’s and DHS Secretary’s concerns.
While reporting from Lukeville, Arizona on Wednesday, TPUSA’s Frontlines team spoke with a Border Patrol agent who said that his unit has “caught terrorists,“ but that there are “a bunch of people that [Border Patrol agents] don’t even track, because we’re doing this right here.” He said this while motioning to the busses on site used to transport illegal immigrants to the nearest processing facility.
In an October interview with Frontlines, retired Texas DPS captain Jaeson Jones called the mass illegal migration the “largest intelligence failure since 9/11.”
In October, documents leaked from the San Diego Field Office Intelligence Division of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) warned that “individuals inspired by, or reacting to the current Israel-Hamas conflict may attempt travel to or from the area of hostilities in the Middle East via circuitous transit across the Southwest border.”
This piece first appeared at TPUSA.
