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For years following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, the Department of Homeland Security stressed that its mission along the Mexican border was to hunt down terrorists intent on attacking the United States. The department was formed in response to the attacks, and its Border Patrol chiefs dismissed illegal
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immigration and drug seizures as secondary missions to the primary mission of stopping terrorists. Its funding requests to Congress focused on stopping terror attacks and its media relations department engaged in a pervasive campaign to ensure people understood that its fundamental mission was anti-terrorism.
These days, that mission seems to have changed. Homeland Security now looks at the border as a region with its own public security crisis waiting to spill over instead of its being used as a staging ground for terror groups from the other side of the world.
The situation such as it is, leaves one to wonder whether the criminals working along the border haven't become the US's best ally in protecting its southern flank against terror.
On its face, the border seems a perfect conduit for terrorists to use to slip into the US. With its established smuggling corridors, some dating back to the Apache Wars -- reinforced by the last century's Prohibition bootleggers and maintained by this century's cartels -- the Mexican border seems ripe for a terror gateway. Every year, hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants pass through what are essentially unprotected swaths of the 2,000-mile long border with Mexico. Mixed in with Mexican and South American illegal migrants are the occasional Iraqi, Somali, even the odd Israeli migrant surfaces -- what Homeland Security calls "Other than Mexicans," and Border Patrol agents refer to as "exotics." Smugglers sneak migrants inside car trunks or simply direct them to hike through the harsh border deserts. Narco-traffickers meanwhile, use small aircraft to fly over the borderline, both eventually disappearing into the anonymity of American cities.
But in spite of a few alarm bells, no terrorist has ever been arrested crossing the Mexican border into the US.
The intelligence failures leading to September 11 changed the game anyway and the United States responded with a massive influx of agents to the Mexico border and a congressional mandate to construct hundreds of miles of new fencing.
A report from the Government Accountability Office, released last fall, estimates that the United States will have spent some $6.5 billion over the next twenty years maintaining the new fencing it erected. The 600 miles of new fence have been breached more than 3,000 times since GAO started tracking in 2005. That number doesn't account for illegal migrants and drug traffickers who simply climb over the fence, place ramps to drive over, or build tunnels to pass under it. On the Mexico side, border towns are plagued with massive and organized syndicates from the Juárez Cartel to the Sinaloa Cartel and the Arellano Felix family, moving millions of pounds of narcotics across the border, all the while engaging in a murderous war that has left thousands dead and public security infrastructure vulnerable and nearly impotent south of the line.
The terrorist-crossing threat, of course, is ever-present; speculative, but backed by just enough suggestion of its possibility that it can never be completely ignored. "There have been no reports of terrorists being arrested at the Mexican border. There have been operatives that have been detained elsewhere that said they might use Mexico as a staging point," says Agnes Gereben Schaefer, a political scientist with the Rand Corporation.
As far back as 2005, the DHS was still pushing the border as a conduit for terrorism. Consider this 2005 interview between a DHS spokesman and BusinessWeek Magazine: "We're very aware of the desire of terrorists to find vulnerability, which is why you see such an increase in assets going to the border."
Panic grows over the Mexico border nearly every time the US enters into a conflict. Archives of a now-defunct Tucson, Arizona, newspaper show that locals were concerned about Nazis using Mexico to gain entry into the country in the 1940s. The same fears were expressed fifty years later; it was said that Saddam Hussein would send terrorists through Nogales after Operation Desert Storm. In the years following September 11, the same concerns were expressed.
"People tend to fixate on the border but the way you monitor terror groups is to look at the totality of their travels," said James Carafano, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. "When you fixate just on the border, you don't see the other aspects of their movements."
In 2007, Texas Homeland Security officials raised eyebrows when they claimed terrorists with ties to Hezbollah, Hamas, and al-Qaeda had been arrested crossing the Texas border. Officials in Washington were quick to back away from the claims and, as it turned out, the only evidence was the 2004 arrest of a woman who had crossed the Rio Grande with pages missing from her South African passport.
Alarm bells rang again in 2007 when informants working for a rival cartel told Drug Enforcement Administration agents that the Sinaloa Cartel planned to move Iraqi fighters into southern Arizona and attack the Fort Huachuca Army base, according to FBI intelligence reports. A second group of Afghan fighters had already been smuggled into the country through a tunnel in Laredo, Texas, the snitch told DEA agents. Neither claim proved to be true.
"There is no way the Sinaloans are ever going to smuggle terrorists into the country," says an FBI agent who has worked along the border for more than 20 years. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not allowed to speak to the news media. "These guys know that if we ever found out they were moving al-Qaeda, we'd clamp down on this border with everything we had and they're making way, way too much money moving dope to let that happen. No way."
Gereben, of the Rand Corporation, agrees.
"They don't want to risk entering that arena," she says.
Officials at Homeland Security won't discuss specifics of their work against terror groups along the border but a US Army intelligence report from last summer titled "Asymmetric Observations Along the U.S.-Mexico Border" gives some insight. The report shows that Border Patrol agents often work with migrant smuggling organizations, offering up rewards to smugglers who turn in exotics from countries that have been known to harbor terrorists.
Most of those, the report suggests, are Iraqi refugees trying to claim asylum in the US.
The changing threat of terror from the border has changed the rhetoric coming out of Washington. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations last July said: "Our growing relationship with Mexico is, of course, part of a broader effort, and it is designed to interdict not only the smuggling of narcotics, weapons, bulk cash and people at the United States-Mexico border but also designed to recognize...and the whole national interest we have in making sure that Mexico and the crime there and the large cartels there are broken up."
All very sound policy, except that it's the existence of those cartels that help protect us. And that seems a very temporary solution.
Michel Marizco is an organized crime reporter in Arizona and northern Mexico. He runs the news and intelligence web site, www.BorderReporter.com, in Tucson.
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