“America is safer”, President Obama claims, but Americans aren’t so sure. Almost half the country, according to a recent poll, thinks the country is less secure than before 9/11 – the highest reading since 2002. The startling emergence of ISIS and horrifying videos of Americans being beheaded have rattled the country, increasing fears of an attack on U.S. soil.
Our own Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel notably described ISIS as a “threat to the United States” and as “beyond anything that we’ve seen.” People are questioning, once again, whether our borders are secure.
A recent video posted by James O’Keefe of Project Veritas (a non-profit dedicated to exposing corruption and fraud) shows him walking into West Texas from Mexico and six miles further, to Highway I-10 – with nary a Border Patrol agent in sight. To make his point, he then wades across the Rio Grande dressed as Osama bin Laden.
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In another video just released, O’Keefe demonstrates that our northern border is open, too. He ferries a passenger dressed as an ISIS terrorist across Lake Erie, depositing him in Cleveland. This does not inspire confidence, which is of course Mr. O’Keefe’s point.
Many Americans fear the return of U.S. citizens who have joined ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and who can easily slip back into our country to pursue their jihad. Also worrisome is the large number of people from Britain who have joined the fight, and who have easy access to Canada. Attorney General Eric Holder raised these concerns when he told Time Magazine, “We are seeing, I would say, an alarming rise in the number of American and European Union nationals who have been going to Syria to help extremist groups. This represents a grave threat to our security.”
Doubts about our border protection were raised anew by scenes of thousands of unaccompanied minors crossing the Rio Grande in recent months. While children from Central America bear no resemblance to ISIS thugs, there is growing worry that the management of our border is inattentive at best, and inept at worst. If we can’t control eight-year-old kids, how can we expect to head off terrorists?
Before President Obama announced to the nation his plan to bomb Syria, Homeland Security representatives were telling members of Congress that they had picked up social media chatter from ISIS participants discussing the possibility of crossing our border.
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John Wagner, an official of the U.S. Border Patrol, testified, "The number of known watch-listed persons we are encountering on the Southwest border is minimal compared to commercial aviation…. We're talking tens versus thousands." That isn’t too reassuring. It only takes one.
The Quadrennial Homeland Security review, published in June claims, “We have built a border security system that is stronger than ever before; the Border Patrol has doubled from approximately 10,000 agents in 2004 to 21,370 in 2014. Investigative resources have also expanded.” Also noted is that “unmanned aerial surveillance tools now can cover the southwest border from California to Texas.”
In his 2013 State of the Union Address, President Obama claimed that beefed-up security along the border had “reduced illegal crossings to their lowest levels in 40 years." A fact-check by CNN noted that the Border Patrol reported apprehending 327,577 illegal immigrants in 2011 –the lowest number since 1972, and down 53 percent from 2008, which “it says indicates that fewer people are trying to cross the border.”
Maybe not. The DHS shifted to using the “apprehensions” yardstick in fiscal 2011 after years of reporting “effective control” over the border. In a critical review, the GAO noted that in 2010, “DHS reported achieving varying levels of operational control of 873 (44 percent) of the nearly 2,000 southwest border miles.” In other words, most of the border was wide open. It seems likely, as the push for immigration reform intensified, that the administration ditched this unimpressive metric, and decided instead to use the number of apprehensions (which they could influence) as a performance benchmark.
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The General Accounting Office threw cold water on this approach in a 2013 report, saying, “Further, studies commissioned by CBP [Customs and Border Patrol] have found that the number of apprehensions bears little relationship to effectiveness because agency officials do not compare these numbers with the amount of cross-border illegal activity.” Overall, the GAO estimated that only 61 percent of those trying to enter the country illegally are caught.
Bottom line: our border is not secure, and is unlikely to be closed any time soon. Janet Napolitano, former head of Homeland Security speaking earlier this year, affirmed as much to the AP on a trip to Mexico, saying, "You cannot seal a border, that's an unrealistic expectation."
Our insecure borders make it all the more important that our law enforcement officials use their assets wisely and effectively. They must also – along with our Commander in Chief -- take an aggressive line on identifying and targeting the enemy. President Obama has finally admitted we’re at war with ISIL. Even in his recent speech announcing the prospective bombing of Syria, the president said, “ISIL is not Islamic.”
His reticence dovetails his administration’s ongoing effort – from categorizing the murderous rampage at Ft. Hood as “workplace violence” to banning terms like “Islamic Jihad” from our National Security manuals – to minimize the threat from radical Islam. In his recent interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd, Obama said, “I just want the American people to understand the nature of the threat” from ISIS. The real question is, does he?
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