It’s being advocated by a few presidential hopefuls that to protect ourselves from terrorists we must defend our borders with large fences.
Yet I cannot recall even one terrorist suspect being on US soil illegally. As far as I can remember they’ve had student visas, stamped passports or were outright citizens.
Which terrorists have crossed the border illegally?
Well technically they all did.
The immigration form asks such devious questions as “are you coming here for the purpose of terrorism or otherwise smashing the state, yes/no ?”. If they did not, in fact, check yes ; then they provided false information on their immigration form, which invalidates their immigration process. So they can be deported/extradited immediately.
That’s why the question is there in the first place : yes, it looks dumb at first glance ; no, they don’t expect terrorists and international gun-runners to check “yes” ; yes it’s the Al Capone gambit.
They didn’t sneak in is what I’m saying.
How hard would it really be for a person to “sneak” into the USA? 20,000 kilometres of coastline, 14000 airports, and 8,000 miles of land borders (not counting Alaska.
It’s fairly easy to get temporary legal access to the US from just about anywhere, so unless we suspect they are a terrorist there is no reason we would stop them from entering the country. Terrorist organizations know this and that’s why they recruit people who have clean backgrounds… it’s also why the US is working so hard to identify anyone who leaves the US and ends up someplace where terrorists are known to frequent and then heads back here.
There is also no way to know if someone has crossed the Mexican or Canadian border in order to get into the US in order to carry out a terrorist plot… we just don’t think it has happened yet.
But no terrorist I am aware of even had to do that.
As far as I know a US border official has approved the entry of every suspected or convicted terrorist on US soil.
Not all of them. Timothy McVeigh - Wikipedia
In fact, most domestic terrorism incidents are committed by Americans. It just happens that 9/11 and a few other very large incidents were committed by non-Americans. But think about the KKK, the Earth Liberation Front, the Unabomber, etc.
There is another thing that is probably skewing your perception – news media seem recently to have begun using the term “terrorism” to refer only the terrorism involving Muslim radicals, generally foreigners. This is an unduly restrictive definition.
Come on guys, please don’t send this to GD. I’m asking a simple question that has a factual answer.
Plus they would have to have already been radicalized. If they come to the US legally and then only after they’re here turned to terrorism, then they wouldn’t have lied.
I’m sorry. I should have tried to respond to your OP. I can’t think of any foreign terrorists in the US who sneaked across the border. Some alleged compatriots in the failed Times Square Bombing were arrested for immigration violations. My recollection is that they had overstayed their visas, not that they came to the US illegally, but this article doesn’t make that clear. 3 arrested as part of Times Square bomb investigation
This is not true at all.
It is very difficult to obtain a legal visa for any kind of visit to the USA from all but the high-income countries as any person from lower income or middle income countries can tell you.
Moderating
Yeah, let’s not question the premise of the OP. I think it is clear that what is being asked about is the legal means by which foreign terrorist suspects may have arrived in the US.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
At least one possible ETA member; link in Spanish to the news of his suicide while being moved to the airport for deportation. Since he was never tried, he officially remains a suspected member rather than a proven one.
I know there have been several ETA members who got picked up in the US while being en busca y captura (wanted by the government) in Spain, but I don’t have a list of which entry methods they’d used.
In the case of Ahmed Ressam, he probably should have just tried to carry the explosives across the border in the woods somewhere instead of trying to come over on the ferry with fake documents. He had an accomplice waiting for him in Seattle so it wouldn’t have been difficult to arrange. He was expecting the lax pre-9/11 border procedures to be a non-issue and indeed by most accounts it was dumb luck that he got caught. If he’d been planning it with the beefed-up entry procedures, it’s quite possible they’d have attempted to hike the explosives across instead.
Of course that sort of gets at the crux of the issue: why would there by terrorists in Canada or Mexico in the first place? Mexico’s got its problems, but its border controls are generally pretty functional (and obviously Canada too) so it’s not like it’s easier to get people or material into those countries from the parts of the world that have traditionally exported terrorism. In Ressam’s case, he was only trying to sneak in from Canada because he just so happened to live there.
Ahmed Ressam who planned to blow up a bomb in LAX as part of a millennium plot for Al Qeda was caught at the Port Angeles ferry crossing by a border officer who thought he was acting suspicious, as GreasyJack mentions.
However, even before then, a lot of the areas of the border where people could cross by foot were protected with the footfall sensors developed for Vietnam - mainly to detect people smugglers trying to get illegal immigrants into the USA. The big concern before 9-11 was smuggling people from Asia into the USA via Canada - Chinese, Sri Lankans, etc. The border south of Montreal was supposedly very heavily covered.
Maybe Mexico,s border controls with non us countries is strict (which is probably what would make sense), but just for the record - they aren’t that strict with the US. I’ve only been there once recently, but the border procedure went like this:
We were in San Diego - and we drove to Mexico.
There was a sign that said “Mexico” or maybe “Welcome to Mexico”, but as far as I could tell there was nothing there. I didn’t see a person or building. We didn’t go through any customs whatsoever. As far as I could tell there wasn’t any room for any as there seemed to be pretty tight fencing and stuff I guess to try and prevent people from “backing up” from Mexico into the US.
If you need to flee into Mexico - it didn’t appear to be that hard to me. I think you could have been driving a van that said “I want to blow up Mexico” painted on the side and you would have made it across the border no problem. How long you could drive around for I’m not so sure, but you would have gotten in unless they had some secret shit I couldn’t see.
This was post 9/11.
For comparison - even the Israeli Mossad seems to usually send their assassins/agents across through the regular border checkpoints.
Mexico has more substantial checkpoints if you go farther into the country. If you’d left the border zone (which includes the whole state of Baja California), you would have been required to stop, fill out paperwork, and acquire (for a fee) tourist permits and a vehicle import permit.
Nitpick: you can travel down the entire Baja Peninsula without the vehicle permit, but the border zone actually ends at Ensenada and San Felipe (both about 100 kilometers south of the border.) There’s usually nobody checking, but you do technically need a tourist permit to go any further south. (Also further nitpicking, there’s two states in Baja.)
In general, though, there’s military checkpoints all over place down there and if you travel any great distance you will eventually get your vehicle searched. It wouldn’t be a great place to move contraband through, of course assuming you’re not actually in cahoots with the authorities.
That is unequivocally incorrect. Immediately crossing the border there are checkpoints at all points of entry.