Report: ISIS Fighter Chosen To Infiltrate US from Southern Border Makes Chilling Confession
Border and immigration issues have been at the forefront of politics since at least the 2016 election. Donald Trump, of course, made immigration a key plank in his platform, talking about border security when many others stayed away from the issue.
But while much of the border debate revolves around migrant caravans and Hispanics entering the country, there is a much more sinister side to the issue.
Conservatives have often warned that the U.S.-Mexico border could be exploited by terrorists who seek to do mass harm to our nation, yet this alarm has usually been laughed off by the establishment media.
It may not be a laughing matter after all. The infamous Islamic State group might be eyeing our southern border as the entry point for destructive plots, at least if reports of a disturbing confession are correct.
“A chilling confession from a captured ISIS fighter has shed light on how the terrorist group intended to exploit the vulnerabilities of the U.S. border with Mexico, using English speakers and westerners to take advantage of smuggling routes and target financial institutions,” Fox News reported Thursday.
One alleged member of the notorious terrorist group claims he was recruited by the organization to plan attacks on the United States, using migration routes from Central America as the starting point.
“Seized ISIS fighter Abu Henricki, a Canadian citizen with dual citizenship with Trinidad, last month said that he was sought out by the violent insurgency’s leadership to attack the U.S. from a route starting in Central America,” Fox reported.
That information came from a report carried out by the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism and published in Homeland Security Today.
Homeland Security Today, meanwhile, is a publication of the Government Technology & Services Coalition. It’s a fairly obscure group that most Americans probably haven’t heard of, but Homeland Security Today has some impressive credentials.
Their editorial board is headed by former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and a variety of respected military and Homeland Security experts make up its additional editors.
In other words, it’s worth taking the report as very credible.
While the establishment media has downplayed the terrorism vulnerabilities of America’s southern border in the past, a Georgetown University professor is calling the videotaped confession “entirely plausible.”
“ISIS has organized plots in Europe with returnees so it seems entirely plausible that they wanted to send guys out to attack,” report-co-author Anne Speckhard, director of the ICSVE and an adjunct associate professor of psychiatry at Georgetown, told Fox.
“The issue that makes a North American attack harder is the travel is more difficult from Syria,” she noted. “So the idea that they would instead use people who were not known to their own governments as having joined ISIS might make it possible for them to board airplanes.”
While many terrorist activities are of course designed to kill or maim as many people as possible, Henricki said during his confession that the attacks the group wanted him to carry out would be intended to “cripple the U.S. economy.”
Using false passports, he and likely others would move from the Caribbean to Mexico and then into the U.S.
“That information, the plan came from somebody from the New Jersey state of America,” the alleged terrorist claimed. “I was going to take the boat from Puerto Rico into Mexico. He was going to smuggle me in,” Henricki added, according to Homeland Security Today.
New York was allegedly a prime target.
That would certainly match the modus operandi of many extremist Islamic terrorist groups. While we remember 9/11 for its horrific loss of life, for example, the World Trade Center was chosen in part because its collapse would deeply impact U.S. banking and the American economy.
Henricki claimed he refused to carry out the Islamic State group’s orders, and was tortured in Syria as a result.
“Henricki surrendered to the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the final assault to take back Baghouz earlier this year,” Fox reported.
“He remains behind bars in the SDF-controlled region of Syria, with their futures in legal limbo as many foreign governments are not willing to take back accused ISIS operatives,” that network said.
Global security expert Alex Hamerstone of the consulting group TrustedSec confirmed that an insider threat to U.S. banking was a very plausible scenario.
“[I]t wouldn’t be a huge stretch for them to get an American to get a job at a bank and then sabotage it,” he told Fox.
Henricki, meanwhile, said he believes the specific plot he was recruited for never got off the ground and is now dead in the water because the Islamic State group has been badly reduced after years of fighting.
U.S.-led strikes are believed to have dramatically impacted the group’s leadership — but there’s no telling whether similar plots could resurface.
If the confession is genuine, it should serve as a wake-up call about our nation’s security.
To ignore the very real possibility of enemy groups exploiting our borders, especially when illegal immigration is rampant, would be foolish.
We need to secure America’s borders, and we need to do it yesterday.
It isn’t a political issue, it’s a matter of national security.
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