Border Patrol Agents Overwhelmingly Support Trump's Wall In New Survey

Stephen Dinan at the Washington Times offers a piece on Border Patrol agents who support the need for a wall on the border.

Border Patrol agents say they can’t be much clearer: They want more walls along the U.S.-Mexico border.

In a survey conducted by the National Border Patrol Council, the agents’ union, they overwhelmingly supported adding a “wall system” in strategic locations, embracing President Trump’s argument that it will boost their ability to nab or deter would-be illegal immigrants. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link: 

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/apr/2/border-patrol-agents-back-trump-wall-survey-finds/ 

Stephen Dinan also offers a piece in the Washington Times on why Border Patrol agents think a steel fence may not be impenetrable, but still is needed. 

You can read the piece via the below link:

 https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jan/10/border-agents-steel-fence-not-impenetrable/ 

MS-13 Gang Members Gaining Numbers By Recruiting Illegal Immigrants: Report

Stephen Dinan at the Washington Times offers a piece on the violent gang MS-13.

The violent MS-13 gang, which was nearly eradicated by the Bush administration, has been able to rebuild its ranks on the backs of illegal immigrant recruits, according to a new think tank report Wednesday.

Nearly a quarter of MS-13 gang members arrested or charged with crimes since 2012 came to the U.S. as part of the Obama-era surge of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC), including a staggering number who have faced murder charges, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, which looked at 506 cases.

Jessica Vaughan, the report’s author, said the Bush administration used immigration laws to go after even low-level MS-13 affiliates, and worked closely with local police — even in sanctuary cities — to try to target gang members.

The Obama administration changed the focus away from rank-and-file illegal immigrants and toward trying to make big cases, hoping to make major conspiracy cases instead.

The result was a collapse in enforcement.

“ICE officers were no longer permitted to arrest and remove foreign gang members until they had been convicted of major crimes. Gang arrests by ICE plummeted from about 4,600 in 2012 to about 1,580 in 2014,” Ms. Vaughan wrote.

She said those changes came just as the gangs were getting an influx of new members thanks to the surge of UAC that began in 2012 and was in full bloom by 2014, drawing tens of thousands of young males from Central America into the U.S. That’s the key recruiting pool for MS-13.

“According to local gang investigators, these gangs have been aggressively recruiting recently arrived Central American children as young as 10 years old,” she wrote.

Ms. Vaughan said sanctuary cities are feeding the problem by creating a no-questions-asked environment, of which the gangs are aware.

President Trump has elevated the issue of MS-13 this year, including inviting to the State of the Union address a top-level Homeland Security investigator and the parents of two teenage girls who were victims of a gang attack.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/21/ms-13-gang-members-gaining-numbers-by-recruiting-i/ 

You can also read my Counterterrorism magazine piece on MS-13 via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2017/12/my-piece-on-ms-13-and-operation.html 

Illegals Commit Crimes At Double The Rate Of Native-Born: Study

Stephen Dinan at the Washington Times offers a piece on a report of on illegal immigrants and crime. 

The crime rate among illegal immigrants in Arizona is twice that of other residents, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Friday, citing a new report based on conviction data.

The report, from the Crime Prevention Research Center, used a previously untapped set of data from Arizona that detailed criminal convictions and found that illegal immigrants between 15 and 35 are less than 3 percent of the state’s population, but nearly 8 percent of its prison population.

And the crimes they were convicted of were, on the whole, more serious, said John R. Lott Jr., the report’s author and president of the research center.

His findings also challenge the general narrative that immigrants commit fewer crimes. Those past studies usually don’t look at legal versus illegal populations, Mr. Lott said.

Mr. Lott said the Arizona data is able to peek behind that curtain, and the differences between the populations were stark.

“There appears to be a huge difference between the two groups,” Mr. Lott said. “The type of person who goes through the process to legally immigrate in the United States appears to be very law-abiding versus even the U.S.-born population. The reverse is true for undocumented immigrants — they are committing crimes, and more serious crimes.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jan/26/illegals-commit-crimes-double-rate-native-born-stu/ 

The Police 'Thin Blue Line' Prevented Massacre On Virginia Baseball Field

Stephen Dinan and Seth McLaughlin at the Washington Times offer a piece on the police ‘Thin Blue Line’ that stopped the gunman from killing people on the Alexandria, Virginia baseball field.

The rifle shots came from the fence over the third base line, shattering the June morning, wounding one congressman and several staffers, and terrifying the two dozen lawmakers and staffers who were also on the field.

Then came gunshots from the other side of the field.

Three U.S. Capitol Police officers, who were at the field as part of their duty to protect a senior Republican lawmaker, were returning fire. They turned the murderous assault by a left-wing fanatic into a raging gunbattle that kept the man off balance and outside the ballfield fence, giving lawmakers and staffers a chance to run for their lives.

The agents then kept the gunman from getting a bead into the concrete dugout where more than a dozen lawmakers and staffers were huddled.

“If he’d gotten in the fence, there would have been a bloodbath,” said Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican and manager of the team, which was practicing for the annual Congressional Baseball Game on Thursday.

In a day full of very human moments and emotions, the agents who were part of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise’s security detail were hailed as absolute heroes, taking on a man with a rifle while armed only with handguns and averting what those on the field said would have been a certain massacre.

“The thin blue line held today,” said Rep. Roger Williams, a coach on the team who injured his ankle diving to the floor of the dugout to get out of the line of fire.

It was, lawmakers said, a classic example of good people with guns stopping a bad man with a gun.

“We were sitting ducks. We had nothing to fight back with but bats, if it came to that,” Mr. Williams told reporters. He said there could have been as many as 25 deaths had the armed officers not been present.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jun/14/capitol-police-guns-saved-lives-at-ballpark/ 

Smuggling By International Crime Syndicates Is What Keeps Homeland Security Chief Up At Night

David Sherfinski and Stephen Dinan at the Washington Times offer a piece on Secretary of Homeland Security John F. Kelly (seen in the above official photo) and his concern over transnational criminal organizations.

Smuggling cartels are now a major threat to the fabric of American society, Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly declared Tuesday, saying the international crime syndicates have shown an incredible ability to sneak drugs and people — and potentially terrorists and dirty bombs — into the U.S.

Mr. Kelly, a former Marine Corps general who is three months into his tenure as secretary, said among all the other dangers facing Americans, the threat from the cartels, known in the security world as “transnational criminal organizations” is what keeps him up at night.

He said the Trump administration has already notched some victories over the criminal networks, including cutting the level of illegal immigration across the southwestern border by a staggering 70 percent. But he said the amount of drugs has increased and that the smuggling cartels share ties with the terrorist networks that the U.S. is fighting overseas.

“We know, as an example, that the money-laundering of massive amounts of profit from the U.S. drug demand — there are terrorist organizations that make money from that money-laundering process,” he said. “It’s an incredibly lucrative way to raise money. They’re not doing it in huge amounts yet, I don’t believe. But to me, it would be a next step. So the nexus between criminal networks and terrorist networks is real, and, I would predict, will get more sophisticated.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/apr/18/john-kelly-smuggling-cartels-major-threat/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWWpWaVptVmlZams0TkRabCIsInQiOiJOc1VSdkl4UUJjcWJcL0E4WWNTSWxWT0ErUkdIcHo0cDJmUUEwRUtIblwvNmpoek5TQWV6WHpER2c0ZXI0Q2JZOXN5Ulg4UmtvU0k1NnMzQWp0WG1ZeGEwTEtPbFVFTFNraGlwMEdLKysxT0hhbFFXdjQzOEtwcE44djJuRnpHM0lHIn0%3D 

72 Convicted In U.S. Terror Cases Came From Nations Targeted For Vetting

Stephen Dinan at the Washington Times offers a piece on 72 terrorism cases where the people came from countries targeted for extreme vetting.

At least 72 convicted terrorists came from the seven countries President Trump targeted in his extreme vetting executive order, according to a new report this weekend that directly undercut part of the courts’ rulings halting the program.

Seventeen of those entered the U.S. under the refugee program that Mr. Trump has said is of special concern to him, according to the data compiled by the Senate Judiciary Committee and analyzed by the Center for Immigration Studies.

The convictions came in terrorism-related investigations since the Sept. 11 attacks, but some were for relatively minor crimes such as identity fraud. Nevertheless, more than 30 of the convicts served at least three years in prison because of their terrorism-related crimes, the CIS report said.

Judge James L. Robart, who first blocked Mr. Trump’s executive order on Feb. 3, insisted in court that there were no such terrorists at all.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/12/terror-convicts-came-from-countries-targeted-for-e/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTVdZNU5qUmhOR014WWpWaCIsInQiOiJ5cDFvQUwrS3J0dDJhXC9neUZLQmJYdUM4K0VPaDN4bzFmWENMUFZIaGZBNUhQOXJjZ3RpTU9lbHNuZVZxNk5wbTNkSG1oS3E4ZTJDeGVKdGY4ZFpOSUJqQjlmN2pNXC9GZFA3TVhVSVF1TTNFWHFXS2xPVzlFbFBkRHgxU1dMcWtPIn0%3D

Fed Hack Reached 21 Million

Stephen Dinan at the Washington Times reports on the computer hacking of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

Federal officials admitted Thursday that hackers got the most sensitive personal information from more than 21 million Americans, further raising the stunning estimate of damage from the cyber intrusion, which has caused chaos at the government’s main human resources agency.

Any individual who underwent a background investigation from 2000 onward is likely affected, the Office of Personnel Management admitted, and nearly 2 million people who never applied but were spouses or lived with applicants also had their data stolen, the agency said.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jul/9/fed-data-hack-reached-staggering-21-million/ 

CIA Releases Memo Showing Agency Blamed Bill Clinton For Bankrupting War On Terror Ahead of 9/11

Stephen Dinan at the Washington Times reports on a CIA document that blamed President Clinton for failing to allow the CIA to combat terrorism prior to 9/11.

The Clinton administration had bankrupted the intelligence community and refused to let the

CIA prioritize anti-terrorism over other major priorities in the late 1990s, leaving the agency stretched too thin in the days ahead of the 2001 terrorist attacks, former Director George J. Tenet (seen in the below photo) said in a 2005 document declassified Friday.

Mr. Tenet, who was head of the agency at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks and has taken severe criticism for not anticipating and heading them off, said in the document that he took the threat of Osama bin Laden very seriously, and put major effort into trying to penetrate al Qaeda, beginning as far back as 1998.

In one revelation, Mr. Tenet says those efforts averted off an earlier “major attack” planned by al Qaeda for some time in 1999 or 2000. The document gives no other details.

The document was a response to an inspector general’s draft report that had accused Mr. Tenet of failing to give al Qaeda enough attention in the months leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks. But Mr. Tenet said he did take steps, amid all the other work CIA was also required to do.

“Your report does not adequately address the context of an intelligence community that had to respond to wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, the prospect of war between India and Pakistan, China’s military buildup and threat to Taiwan, the requirements of policy makers, particularly in Congress, to pursue narco-traffickers in Central and South America, and numerous other such requirements,” Mr. Tenet wrote. “Despite all of these stresses, despite the fact that we had effectively been in Chapter 11 as an intelligence community, we continued on a path to methodically increase both CIA and intelligence community resources and our personnel base devoted to terrorism.”

In addition to Mr. Tenet’s response document, which had originally been classified “top secret/codeword sensitive,” the CIA released more full versions Friday of several other documents that had been released earlier

You can read the rest of the story via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jun/12/clinton-admin-bankrupted-cia-ahead-911-ex-director/

ICE Melting: Feds Released Hundreds Of Immigrant Murderers, Drunk Drivers, Sex-Crimes Convicts

Stephen Dinan at the Washington Times offers a piece on immigration officials releasing immigrant criminals.

Immigration officials knowingly released dozens of murderers back into the U.S. in 2013, according to Obama administration statistics detailing all of the criminal convictions of the more than 36,000 immigrants released from custody last year.

The numbers show that the criminals released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had amassed more than 15,000 drunken-driving convictions, 1,317 domestic violence convictions and even four that the statistics listed as “treason, sabotage.” There were also convictions for homicide, another 43 for negligent manslaughter, 14 convictions of voluntary manslaughter and one classified as “homicide-willful kill-public official-gun.”

The immigrants were in deportation proceedings, meaning ICE was trying to remove them from the country and could have held them in detention, but released them anyway, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, which obtained the numbers and published a report Monday morning. The Washington Times also obtained the statistics.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/12/feds-released-hundreds-immigrant-murderers-drunken/