Terror Threat On Southern Border - There Are Already Cases To Prove It

By Bill West

Thanks to IT expert and CT Blog regular reader Timothy Thompson, we learn the deportation case in Seattle against an African Muslim Imam is proving to be yet another indicator the US - Mexican border poses a very real threat to the Nation’s counter-terrorism efforts. Abrahim Sheikh Mohamed is the Imam of the Abu Bakr Mosque in Rainier Valley, Washington and was arrested by ICE agents in November for immigration removal (deportation) violations, allegedly stemming from his falsifying an application for asylum, per reports. Mohamed is now reported to have agreed to give up his fight against deportation. There appear to be issues, however, concerning his true citizenship...whether he is really Kenyan or Somali, and to where he may actually be deported. As previously noted here, and here, while deportation to Somalia is legally possible for the US Government, physically accomplishing such a task is problematic.

That issue aside, the deportation case against Mohamed, who is suspected by the Government of having ties to and supporting radical Islamists, identified that he originally entered the United States by being smuggled in from Mexico in 2000.

On June 15, 2005, Mahmoud Youssef Kourani, a Lebanese citizen and illegal alien, was sentenced in Detroit to 54 months imprisonment after he pleaded guilty to the charge of conspiracy to provide material support to Hezbollah. The investigation leading to Kourani’s prosecution and conviction, that was conducted by ICE and the FBI, revealed that Kourani’s brother was the chief of security for Hezbollah in Lebanon. The investigation also revealed that Kourani sponsored Hezbollah fundraising meetings in his Dearborn, Michigan home.

The Kourani investigation identified that he, too, was smuggled into the United States from Mexico.

Cases like those of Mohamed and Kourani show the southern border of the US is, in fact, utilized by terrorist-connected aliens to illegally enter the United States. And these are simply two of the examples who have been caught and prosecuted and are publicly identified. Yet there continues to be public posturing from some Government officials and many in the media that our southern border has yet to be “proven” a security threat as a terrorist alien entry area. There is a lot of desert sand out there in which the ostriches can bury their heads.

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