ISIS: ‘We Are in Your State’

By Joe Guzzardi
August 25, 2014

This weekend, U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe, the Armed Services Committee’s ranking Republican, cautioned that ISIS terrorists are “rapidly developing a method to blow up a major American city,” namely a weapon of mass destruction. ISIS posted an online note warning that, because of President Obama’s ties to the city, Chicago could be its first target.  A Tweet with Chicago’s Old Republic in the background read: “We are in your state. We are in your cities. We are in your streets. You are our goals anywhere.” 

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security issued strong warnings to Americans to be alert for suspicious behavior. In their news conference, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel with Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Demsey said that ISIS is as well funded and blood thirsty as any terrorist organization they’ve ever dealt with. As owners of eastern Syrian and western Iraqi oil wells and refineries, ISIS has $2 billion in cash to carry out its murderous agenda. Hagel’s exact description of ISIS: “Beyond anything we’ve ever seen.”

Hagel and Demsey have ample evidence to support their statement: the journalist James Foley’s beheading and multiple, confirmed reports of Christian children massacred including several bodies severed at the waist. Despite what may be a heightened state of U.S. vigilance, the FBI fears that a lone operative would be nearly impossible to detect.

With the entire world aware that the U.S. southern border is wide open and that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is under White House instructions to look the other way at most illegal immigration, the nation is a sitting duck for an ISIS attack. A responsible government would militarize the border, and firmly announce that various proposals for expanding the numbers of annual work-based visas to as many as 800,000 foreign-born nationals are off the table. Instead, Obama’s inner circle has held nearly two dozen summer meetings to explore ways the administration can ram through a massive guest worker program and amnesty without congressional or public approval.

But the hour to save American from another 9/11 may have already passed. Never mind the porous border, hundreds of Islamic terrorists are already inside the U.S. with the federal government’s blessing. They’ve come on work, student and spousal visas from nations sympathetic to terrorists. Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense K.T. McFarland told Fox News that ISIS includes “several hundred” with U.S. passports.

Every day brings another risk. In a shocking new development, aliens released on their own recognizance can board commercial airliners showing only their notice to appear [in immigration court] letters, paperwork that can easily be duplicated on a home computer. One judge issued a notice to appear with a 2020 date. And the confirmed report that last year DHS released back into the mainstream 169 illegal aliens convicted of murder represents another sign that the White House is making no serious effort to protect innocent Americans. 

The Obama administration has learned nothing from 9/11. Of the 48 foreign-born militant Islamic terrorists who either confessed to or were convicted of 9/11 involvement, almost all exploited some loophole in immigration law to enter and remain in America. Included were visa fraud, overstayed tourist visas, fake asylum claims, and falsified passports. Seventeen terrorists became either lawful permanent residents or U.S. citizens; 12 were illegal aliens who had eluded immigration officials.

Today, 13 years later, ISIS could just as easily perpetrate any of those immigration abuses, a sorry, inexcusable and potentially deadly dangerous testimonial to the White House’s indifference to domestic security.

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Joe Guzzardi is a Californians for Population Stabilization Senior Writing Fellow whose columns have been syndicated since 1987. Contact him at [email protected]