Todd Bensman: FOIA Request Reveals US Invited Citizens From 96 Countries to Cross the Border
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Source: Center for immigration Studies
Congress Should Look Into DHS's 'Homeland Threat Assessment 2024'
Is its anodyne explanation for the Biden border surge driven by politics or incompetence?
By Andrew R. Arthur | October 17, 2023
I recently analyzed the potential terrorist threats posed by the millions of migrants who have crossed the Southwest border illegally since Joe Biden became president, particularly in light of the recent savagery caused in Israel by Hamas terrorists who crossed illegally from Gaza. l specifically referenced passages from DHS's recently released "Homeland Threat Assessment 2024" that focused on border vulnerabilities terrorists could (and likely will) exploit. The report was prepared by the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A), headed by Undersecretary Kenneth L. Wainstein. Congress may want to call him in to discuss those vulnerabilities, and also to ask him questions about I&A's take on the reasons for the recent border surge — and one particularly questionable piece of artwork therein.
Intelligence, September 11th, I&A, and the "Homeland Security Act". I&A is likely not as familiar to most as other DHS agencies like ICE and CBP, but its role, at least as originally envisioned, is every bit as crucial to homeland security.
That's because as much as anything, September 11th was a massive intelligence failure. As the RAND Corporation has explained:
The Cold War methodology of intelligence involved the gathering and keeping of "secrets" and was organized in a "stovepipe" manner according to the government source from which it originated. There were a limited number of sources, such as the National Security Agency (NSA) or the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA). Intelligence analysis was centralized, but not monopolized, by the CIA.Agency "stovepiping" of intelligence might have made sense when we were in a Cold War against one opponent, but it became an impediment when the United States was facing a wide range of adversaries, some state-supported and others decidedly not.
The problem, as the 9/11 Commission noted in its final report, is that: "It is hard to 'break down stovepipes' when there are so many stoves that are legally and politically entitled to have cast-iron pipes of their own." A wide range of agencies needed actionable intelligence pre-9/11, but it wasn't easily accessible — assuming those agencies who needed it knew it existed at all.
Enter Congress and the 2002 "Homeland Security Act" (HSA), which created DHS out of an cluster of various agencies in different departments. So critical was intelligence to the envisioned success of the project that the second title in the act (directly after the creation of the secretary's office in Title I) was "Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection", pp. 11 to 28 in a 187-page bill.
The idea was that "information analysis" would protect homeland "infrastructure", and so the first section of Title II created an "Under Secretary for Homeland Security for Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection" who was to be assisted by an "Assistant Secretary for Information Analysis".
Don't go looking for that assistant secretary on the current DHS organization chart, however, because in the "Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007", that position was raised to the under-secretary level as the head of I&A, and made a critical part of the federal government's "intelligence community" under 50 U.S.C. §3041, right up there with the director of the NSA.
Under Secretary Kenneth L. Wainstein. The current Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence and Analysis is Kenneth L. Wainstein, and with due respect to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, he probably has the most impressive resume in the department.
Before taking the job, Wainstein was a partner in a D.C. law firm; taught national security law for a dozen years; was a longtime federal prosecutor in the two most prestigious U.S. attorney's offices (the Southern District of New York and the District of Columbia — in the latter as U.S. attorney); acted as general counsel to the FBI; and served as the first assistant attorney general for national security at DOJ, under the George W. Bush administration.
Like me, he received his B.A. from the University of Virginia, so he started out strong — likely the key to his success. It does make you wonder why he wanted the I&A gig, however.
"Traditional Drivers of Migration to the United States Remain Unchanged". All of that expertise, coupled with Wainstein's nonpartisan resume, make his office's assessment of the reasons for the Biden border surge all the more confusing:
Record numbers of migrants traveling from a growing number of countries have been encountered at our borders this fiscal year, with some monthly decreases largely attributed to migrants exploring new legal pathways or the expressed fear of penalties for irregularly crossing following the lifting of the Title 42 Public Health Order. We expect continued high numbers of migrant encounters over the next year because traditional drivers of migration to the United States remain unchanged and frustration with waiting for legal migration pathways may grow. [Emphasis added.]I will concede that confusion about how the Biden administration's border policies would change post-Title 42, coupled with the opportunity to take advantage of the (unlawful) "new legal pathways" that the White House was offering to buy off would-be illegal entrants, drove down illegal entries (briefly) in May and June.
Turning to the highlighted portion of the excerpt, however, I&A: (1) fails to list those "traditional drivers of migration" that will "remain unchanged" (or any reason why they would remain unchanged); and (2) presents the claim that illegal migration is driven, at least in part, by migrants' "frustration with waiting for legal migration pathways", particularly when there's no evidence showing that to be true.
Those "legal migration pathways" are no narrower than they were in prior years in which illegal entries were significantly lower, and so blaming them for the current surge is a flawed post hoc rationalization.
And lest you think I am being picayune in my criticism of the inexactitude of the description of those unchanged "traditional drivers of migration", consider the following, also from that report:
The most lethal attack this year occurred in May in Allen, Texas, where a now-deceased attacker killed eight people at a shopping mall. The attacker was fixated on mass violence and held views consistent with racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist (RMVE) and involuntary celibate violent extremist ideologies, judging from his writings and online activities.I will confess that I am no expert on what motivates people to engage in senseless acts of violence, and consequently I have no opinion on whether I&A's assessment of that killer's motivations are correct or not. But it's plain that I&A did a deep dive into the motivations of that actor.
Contrast that assessment, however, with the office's scant and utterly conclusory explanation for why, as I&A explains earlier in that report, "record encounters of migrants" are "arriving from a growing number of countries" in a way that "have complicated border and immigration security" and created a vulnerability "[t]errorists and criminal actors may exploit".
Please go to Center for immigration Studies to continue reading.
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When you plow through all the initial self-aggrandizing that these multi-billion dollar funded bureaucracies put forward first, what exactly is their responsibility considering the US border?
Related:
CIS Sues Biden Administration for Terror Suspect Border-Crossing Data
Overrun Book: The Trailer and Excerpts
CIS Sues Biden Administration for Terror Suspect Border-Crossing Data
Overrun Book: The Trailer and Excerpts
Look Joe, there is a huge difference between 1789 and 2023:
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