As each new terrorist threat arises — Hamas, al-Qaida, al-Shabab — the alarm is raised again.
Now it’s Islamic State’s turn: Texas Gov. Rick Perry and others have worried aloud that members of Islamic State have already crossed the U.S.-Mexico border or are preparing an attack from Mexico’s border region.
“Islamic terrorist groups are operating in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez and planning to attack the United States with car bombs or other vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices,” the group Judicial Watch reported Aug. 29, citing “high-level” sources.
The alarm quickly spread, especially with tomorrow’s anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks approaching.
It’s possible, of course, for such an attack to occur, but as with so many such perceived threats, it’s unlikely.
To the extent that border problems pose a realistic threat to someplace like Tucson and Southern Arizona, it’s much more likely to be realized in an incident like the outrageous attack that occurred four days after the Judicial Watch piece was published. That day, a 16-year-old Tucson boy was kidnapped and held for ransom before being rescued by Tucson police the next day.
Of the five people arrested so far (a sixth is on the loose), three were previously deported from the United States but managed to find their way back here.
If you want to worry about the Mexican border, that’s the wiser place to focus your fear, not on Middle East terrorist groups.
It’s not just me saying this. Listen to people like Tony Coulson, who retired in 2010 after crucial, post-9/11 years as head of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Tucson office.
“Our vulnerability to terrorist activity has nothing to do with the border,” Coulson told me Tuesday. A smuggling organization that brings in a terrorist would be causing itself tremendous, unnecessary risk, he said.
Still, the attraction of combining fears of the border and of terrorism is clear. A significant number of people who try to cross the border illegally from Mexico make it across, even now. Therefore, foreign terrorists who want to hurt the United States could try to get smuggled across to achieve their aims.
The concern goes back, at least, to 1986. An Arizona Daily Star story that year said Cochise County Attorney Alan Polley told a U.S. Senate subcommittee that local officials needed help preventing cross-border terrorism. An FBI official told the same panel there was no significant threat of terrorism at the border.
What happened in the intervening decades? Essentially, nothing. A few people have crossed the Mexican border, legally or illegally, and worked here to help fund Hamas or other terrorist groups abroad. None has crossed illegally and launched terrorist attacks here.
Still, alarmists such as Perry and Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu have made a talking point out of the “OTMs” — Other Than Mexicans, in Border Patrol parlance — who are sometimes caught, coming from countries such as Pakistan, Syria and Iraq. It’s true, they do come occasionally, and sometimes leave prayer rugs or other paraphernalia signifying their Middle Eastern origin in the borderland.
That doesn’t mean they’re terrorists. People from those regions are pulled by the same motivations that draw Mexicans and Central Americans: economic opportunity, family connections, the need to leave a bad situation.
Look at the long list of people convicted in the United States of terrorism-related crimes, and what you’ll find is a bunch of American citizens, legal residents or people who arrived on valid visas, not illegal crossers. The Federation of American Scientists has collected the Justice Department’s list of terrorism convictions for years, but only has obtained the convictions through 2011 so far.
Looking through the 2011 convictions, you find people like Colleen LaRose, aka Jihad Jane, an American convert to Islam who aided a plot to kill a Swedish artist who had drawn a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad.
You’ll see Farooque Ahmed, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Pakistan who plotted to attack a Washington, D.C., subway.
You’ll come across the name Aftab Ali Khan, a Pakistani who came to the U.S. on a 90-day visitor visa, overstayed while working at a Massachusetts gas station and funneled $4,900 to the man who tried to bomb Times Square.
The sad truth is, if foreign terrorist groups want to find someone to attack the United States, there are enough U.S. citizens and legal visitors willing to help them out.
Here’s how University of Texas-El Paso political science professor Gaspare Genna, an expert in North American relations, put it: “It would just be easier for (Islamic State) to recruit someone who is in the United States to carry on these types of activities than to find someone who can maneuver in U.S. society, bring them to Mexico and pay a smuggler.”
That lower-grade criminality is left to people like Jose Angel Reyes-Palomino, Jose Pedro Molina-Durguin and Juan Carlos Martinez-Barojas. Each of them was caught illegally entering the United States in Southern Arizona since 2010, and each is now charged with kidnapping the Tucson boy, holding him in a humble house near Apollo Middle School, beating him and drugging him.
They demanded a $400,000 ransom from his family and threatened to cut off his fingers until Tucson police heroically charged in on Thursday and saved the boy.
These cross-border threats — kidnappings, home invasions — are familiar enough that we in Tucson know how to deal with them. The common assumption, which I heard widely after the kidnapping, is that the boy’s family was involved in illegal doings. That allows us to dismiss the case as foreign from our day-to-day lives.
But really, the boy was one of ours, and his kidnapping and mistreatment was an outrage. That’s the sort of attack by cross-border criminals that we need to worry about.
