Arizona AG: Middle East Funding Terrorist Cells in Mexico, Central America

Joe Guzzardi
March 28, 2016

In early March, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s office issued a report which found a money trail link between the Middle East and Mexico. Last November, immigration agents had detained five Pakistani nationals and one Afghani national south of Tucson for illegally entering the U.S. A few days later, five more Middle Eastern men were caught crossing a privately-owned Arizona ranch. Two carried suspicious stainless steel cylinders in their backpacks, and two were listed as “unknown subjects,” an unheard of classification according to a veteran federal law enforcement officer.

In light of those events, Brnovich ordered an investigation which eventually revealed evidence of smuggling routes funded by terrorist-sponsoring Middle Eastern nations that facilitate travel through Mexico into the U.S. The Arizona Attorney General’s Financial Crimes Task Force identified wire transfers sent from the Middle East to smugglers in Mexico. Nogales, Mexico, just across the Arizona border, is a primary destination for the illicit funds. Earlier reports, confirmed by high-level Mexican authorities, revealed that ISIS is operating terrorist training camps on the border.

While Capitol Hill had no reaction to Arizona’s disturbing discovery, Neville Cramer, a retired immigration special agent who worked on counterterrorism cases, said that despite White House claims that the border is secure, it’s wide open. Cramer warned that since Mexican and Central American terrorist cells are aware of the easily-crossed porous border, Americans should be on high alert, a conclusion that Brnovich agrees with since, as he said, “there are many more folks from the Middle East coming into the United States.”

But when the subject is terrorism or the Obama administration’s determination to resettle Middle Eastern refugees, nothing sways the President—not Paris, not San Bernardino, not Ankara, not Belgium, and not Lahore, Pakistan. In those cities, ISIS and al-Qaeda have killed hundreds of innocent citizens, including infants and some Americans.

On Easter Sunday in Lahore, a Taliban terrorist bombed a local park where 300 Christians celebrated the High Holy Day. At least 72 are confirmed dead, and 300 injured. The Taliban boasted about the killings, and confirmed that it had targeted rejoicing Christians.

Despite deadly evidence of the dangers posed by Middle Eastern refugees that, as FBI Director James Comey has repeatedly testified, cannot be adequately vetted, Obama presses on with his resettlement agenda. In his speech to the UN last year, Obama pledged that the U.S. would take in 100,000 refugees from Syria, Iraq and neighboring countries annually during the next two years, a significant increase from the initial 10,000 he promised earlier. Blind to reality, but following Obama’s lead, Secretary of State John Kerry insists that the U.S. “is on the road” to beating ISIS. In their delusional denial of the global terrorism threat, Obama and Kerry have an ally in Pope Francis who in his Easter sermon recommended employing “weapons of love” to defeat “the evil of blind and brutal violence.”

Even though the consensus among security experts is that an attack on American is inevitable, the administration’s disregard for public safety is boundless. Irrefutable proof: in its annual December report sent to Congress, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services confirmed that in 2014 the Obama administration provided permanent residency asylum status to more than 1,500 individuals with ties to terrorism. Protecting American should be, but in the Obama administration is not, paramount.

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Joe Guzzardi is a Californians for Population Stabilization Senior Writing Fellow. Contact him at [email protected]