The lynchpin of our border crisis is not a lack of border enforcement, but a lack of legal enforcement. It all boils down to the invasion under the guise of asylum backed by lawfare. But is there really anything wrong with the way the asylum laws are written, or is there something wrong with the brains of our political class applying a law to the exact opposite situation it was intended to address? In the case of the Central American invasion since 2014, it’s a lot more of the latter.

To begin, both our laws governing refugee status for unaccompanied children and asylum are designed to protect victims of trafficking and persecution, not those engaging in trafficking to fleece America or those simply reuniting with other illegal family members with no evidence of persecution at home. Asylum was not designed for anyone living in an impoverished and/or violent country. That would make two billion or so people eligible for legal status. It was designed for individuals persecuted by their government. For example, a case like Charlie Gard’s parents in Great Britain, in my opinion, or groups of persecuted ethnic or religious minorities victimized by the majority in a one-way persecution, not a civil war.

Say what you want about Central America, but it’s one of the most homogenous places in the world. There are no persecuted ethnic and religious minorities, and none of them are coming to America because they are being persecuted by the government for, say, supporting free market health care or gun rights. In other words, it’s inconceivable that any of them are persecuted based on “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion,” as required by law.

Illegal immigration is all about incentives, not persecution

To the extent that there are push factors driving the migration, it’s all economics. Of course people will come if we incentivize them to come here through amnesty. Hundreds of millions of people would come if we opened our doors. But the ebb and flow of Central American migration does not respond to push factors, much less factors associated with violence (which, again, is not grounds for asylum); it responds to pull factors of our politics in America.

The media has lied to us from day one. To begin with, 80 percent of the children who have crossed over the border since 2014 are not with parents but are unaccompanied. Only 20 percent come with parents. Either way, almost all of them have been resettled with family members who have successfully evaded the Border Patrol over the years and have settled in the country illegally. Why did this begin in 2014? Because of DACA and the understanding that they will get amnesty, just like it is resurging this year because of catch-and-release policies. The El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) drafted a memo in 2014 asserting that 95 percent of the border-crossers interviewed cited the promise of amnesty as the primary factor behind their migration, not violence back home.

Violence is down, migration is up!

The twisted irony is that violence in Central America actually dropped by 30 percent over the exact same time of the border surge, which shows that this is all a fraud being perpetrated on America's dime. Oh, and 73 percent of the migrants in fiscal year 2017 were male, the most violent demographic of any civilization, which doesn’t exactly reflect a reality of fleeing from violence. If the primary factor were violence, then why in the world would we not see more women in this percentage? Sounds similar to what’s going on in Europe, huh?

If you break down the murder rate trends by individual country, you see an inverse relationship between violence and migration. As noted earlier this week, by far, Guatemala is dominating the illegal migration, with Honduras increasing but more modestly, and El Salvador decreasing. Guess what? El Salvador has three times the murder rate of Guatemala and is still 46 percent higher than Honduras. Thus, the country with the lowest murder rate has the highest migration rate and vice versa. According to Phoenix ICE officials, 85 percent of the families coming through the Yuma sector of the border are from Guatemala!

Either way, all of the countries have been trending down in violence, exactly coinciding with the border surge. In fact, migrants are more likely to experience violence on the trip to America, thanks to the “compassion” of our open borders magnet, than they are in their home countries.

Bringing the violence to America – the exact opposite of asylum

With this factual background in mind, now we can appreciate how the fact that Central America is still relatively violent is actually a reason not to let these people in without first being processed off our shores. We are bringing in predominantly young males from some of the most violent countries in the world, all of which are from the same homogenous population as the “persecutors.” This is not to say all of them have been violent or will be violent when coming here, but just that there is no way to disentangle a persecuted minority from a persecuting majority as we could with, for example, the Yazidis, who are being persecuted by the Sunnis in Iraq. In that case, we could bring in the Yazidis a) because they are legitimate asylees and b) because there is no concern that we would also be bringing in the very problem they are fleeing.

Obviously, this violates the most basic solemn duty of the federal government to protect American citizens from external violence. But for all those virtue-signalers who think the job of our government is to sacrifice our security for the needs and desires of other countries, they must remember that their virtue-signaling is a vice, not a virtue for those very people. What good are we doing those peaceful migrants if we bring them in through the uncontrolled border migration in such large numbers that they reconstitute the worst elements of a place like Honduras right here in our own cities? While the gangs and drugs are killing all Americans, it is most concentrated in the communities where these illegal immigrants are living.

Liberal outlets like the Washington Post forget the irony of their virtue-signaling when they have reported endlessly on places like Brentwood, Long Island, where a predominantly Hispanic community and school were torn apart by hordes of teenagers in 2014, some of whom “had never gone to school and couldn’t read or write in any language.” They reported on MS-13 becoming a “powerhouse” and the community “changing” with the surge of Central American teens. Remember, many of those teens are now 19-23 years old.

The same outlet also reported on an “overwhelmingly Hispanic school in Prince George’s County,” Maryland, where MS-13 would “sell drugs, draw gang graffiti and aggressively recruit students recently arrived from Central America, according to more than two dozen teachers, parents and students.” It was so bad that “most of those interviewed asked not to be identified for fear of losing their jobs or being targeted by MS-13.”

Last year, the Post did a report on an illegal immigrant woman from Guatemala who has to pay ransom to MS-13 not to be killed and how she felt she was living with the very elements she fled. She was living in the U.S. for 10 years, but things changed around the DACA surge when “MS-13 was on the rebound, fueled by fresh recruits from an unprecedented wave of almost 200,000 unaccompanied minors from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.”

The gang was almost eradicated under Bush’s 287(g) program, but DACA and sanctuary cities fueled this unprecedented surge, growing every month.

According to the Post, “The gang’s growth has been fueled by a wave of 200,000 teens who traveled to the United States alone to escape poverty and gang violence in Central America. … Nearly 5,000 of those unaccompanied minors have arrived in Prince George’s since 2012.” This parallels comments made by Geraldine Hart, police commissioner of Suffolk County, New York, that the entirety of the MS-13 crisis is because of the unaccompanied minors and that Long Island had it bad because it was “the largest recipient of UACs in the nation.”

Former Ohio governor and presidential candidate John Kasich says the Lord wants us to have open borders. We know people like him couldn’t care less about Americans, but if he had a shred of compassion in his soul, he’d support Trump’s plan to only accept asylum claims in a stable and secure environment in our consulates, so we are not bringing along with them the very hellish environment from which they seek refuge.

What could go wrong with a raucous group of predominantly males from the most violent Latin American countries headed for our southern border? Well, drugs, gangs, crime, and a fiscal drain on our economic resources are a few reasons to fear this invasion. But there is also an extra national security concern that Middle Easterners, who are already traveling independently to our border, are mixed in with this caravan. It’s a general concern that we should take very seriously both with the caravan and the broader waves of illegal immigration.

Yesterday, Trump tweeted that “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in” with the caravan. Clearly, Trump has been getting briefings on this issue and is paying attention.

During the waning months of the Obama administration, none other than former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson sent out a memo to law enforcement agencies with the subject line, “Cross-Border Movement of Special Interest Aliens." According to DHS’ official definition, Special Interest Aliens (SIAs) are individuals from 35 countries that “have shown a tendency to promote, produce, or protect terrorist organizations,” aka countries from the Middle East or those in Africa and Asia with a presence of terrorist networks. The Johnson memo called for the creation of a “multi-DHS Component SIA Joint Action Group” designed to “counter the threats posed by the smuggling of SIAs” and “the increased global movement of SIAs” in order to eventually “bring down organizations involved in the smuggling of SIAs into and within the United States.” As Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies observed, the memo was “unusual in the sense that they demanded the ‘immediate attention’ of the nation's most senior immigration and border security leaders to counter such an obscure terrorism threat.” Bensman is a former intelligence officer for Texas Department of Public Safety.

Of course, this plan never came to fruition, but the fact that someone as liberal as Jeh Johnson found a need to warn about “the increased global involvement of SIAs” should be very concerning to all of us.

Reporters who don’t bother to study issues in the long term and merely react to the mindless soap opera of the day are acting shocked at Trump’s concern about the Middle East migrants coming through the border. CNN’s Jake Tapper wants Trump to provide him with proof of such a phenomenon. To anyone who has studied Latin America, this is a long-standing concern that is always present, irrespective of whether we have a smoking gun in every particular caravan. It certainly ranks among the top reasons to deter these incursions. There is a trail of both governments and Arab diaspora communities in numerous South and Central American countries that are facilitating this smuggling network.

Here’s the current reality:

• Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales publicly said last week that he deported 100 Middle Easterners in his country, some with suspected ties to terror. Guatemala has become a hub for international migration of all sorts, including from the Middle East and south Asia, because that is the transit point from all directions into America.
• In the Laredo, Texas, border sector, a record 668 Bangladeshi nationals were caught in fiscal year 2018. Over 3,000 SIAs were apprehended in total. One can imagine how many we didn’t apprehend. Also, 9,000 Indian nationals were apprehended this year. While India is not an official SIA country, it has a massive Muslim population of 172 million with a lot of terror groups operating on the ground, particularly in the north. Men make the majority of migrants apprehended in all border sectors, but this percentage has been exceptionally high in Laredo, where 88 percent of those apprehended in FY 2017 were men. That should be a bright red flag.
• Venezuela is the single biggest country of concern when it comes to SIAs mixing with Latin American migrants. Remember, not all migrants who gather in the northern triangle of Central America originated there. There are hundreds of thousands of migrants pouring out of Venezuela, as it completely crumbles into a failed state. Not only is Venezuela Hezbollah’s main base of operations in South America, with direct ties to the country’s vice president, who is of Syrian descent, but there are hundreds of thousands of Lebanese and Syrian expatriates living there. Some 37,000 Venezuelans cross into Colombia every day, and there are signs that some of the two million refugees have already headed north. This could become our Syria.

Perhaps reporters like Tapper ought to speak with people who are actually involved in Latin American affairs. Joseph Humire, who served as an expert witness in a first-of-its-kind anti-Hezbollah trial in Peru, told me that he’d be surprised if Middle Easterners aren’t coming in with the caravan simply because they are already traveling these same routes on their own. "The #CaravanHonduras has exposed an important yet underreported issue — the presence and activity of radical Islamist terrorist movements in Central and South America,” said Humire, executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society. “The movement of irregular migrants cannot be separated from the increase in SIAs in recent years, especially as we correlate the routes and chokepoints used by the Caravan in Guatemala and Mexico. The Aguas Calientes (Guate-Honduras) to Tecun Uman (Guate-Mexico) border crossings are a known SIA route used in the past, as recently as this past April-June when unidentified Palestinians with suspected terror ties took this same route.”

Indeed, these are the routes being taken by the current caravan. Keep in mind that the caravan is working through the Chiapas district of Mexico right near cities like San Cristobal that have populations of recent Muslim converts, a growing phenomenon in the region. None other than open-borders advocate and former Mexican President Vincente Fox accused some of them of having ties to al Qaeda. There are very strong reasons to be concerned with the caravan traveling a known SIA route and passing by such a community.

Humire’s sources in the Morales government also tell him that “at least 44 Syrians have been detained in Guatemala since 2016, all with forged or irregular documents and one with possible ties to ISIS.” Also, many other SIAs “have been moving through Guatemala with fraudulent documents from other countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia,” whom “local authorities believe are connected to Hezbollah.”

What about from this caravan? Humire sent me reports he’s received from Guatemalan law enforcement that Guatemala apprehended 100 individuals who were not from Honduras over the past 72 hours. On Friday, Guatemalan police claim to have apprehended seven Bangladeshis, two individuals from Sri Lanka, and one from Nepal. They are being processed for deportation. On Monday, they caught 11 Cubans and three more from Bangladesh. There have also been individuals from Angola, Congo, and Cameroon apprehended by local authorities.

Yesterday, the Daily Caller reported that a Univision reporter on the ground has confirmed the presence of Bangladeshis and that they were apprehended by Guatemalan authorities.

Could the Morales regime and his officials be exaggerating? Perhaps, but I think we ought to take Guatemalans seriously when they are warning of Middle Easterners traveling through the human smuggling routes headed north. Morales has every reason to cooperate with us now that Trump is threatening to suspend foreign aid.

Broadly speaking, it’s shocking how ignorant the elite media is about the growing threat of terrorism in Latin America at both the state level and the grassroots level. Not everything revolves around the Middle East, believe it or not.

Perhaps Tapper and his ilk should heed the words of Michael Braun, former chief of operations with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Braun sent Conservative Review the following statement regarding the president’s concern over Middle Easterners traveling along the Latin American migrant routes:

The President is justifiably concerned about Middle Eastern terrorist organizations exploiting our borders. Hezbollah and Iran’s IRGC Quds Force, which is responsible for clandestine foreign operations, to include assassinations, have significantly increased their footprint throughout Latin America and Mexico over the past decade … Hezbollah’s growing involvement in the global cocaine trade over the past decade has resulted in the formation of alliances with Colombian and Mexican drug trafficking cartels, the most sophisticated transnational organized crime syndicates law enforcement has ever faced.

Braun was responsible for oversight of all of the DEA’s foreign offices during the Bush years and has testified before Congress many times on the confluence of drug trafficking and terror networks, illicit finance, and other national security topics.

It’s important to remember that although the caravan is a big concern, there are hundreds of thousands of others crossing our border every year, quietly smuggled in by the cartels. This must be stopped as well. Thanks to our judicial amnesty, DHS incompetence, and congressional ineptitude, we have family units coming in record numbers. The Arizona Sherriff’s Association warned in a letter last week that Border Patrol “is currently using up to 40% of their available staff to monitor family units.” Congress and the courts have turned them into babysitters while MS-13, drugs, and yes, Middle Easterners, are crossing the border.

Typically the interdiction rate at the border is about 50 percent, but you have to imagine, given that the SIAs pay up to $30,000 for successful smuggling, that the border cartels, which control the entirety of the flow of movement across the border, are orchestrating the family unit crossings in a way that will ensure more of the high-value targets successfully cross un-interdicted. “The coyote is interested in one thing only — collecting his money and moving his illicit customers across that border as quickly as possible,” warned Braun. “Anyone believing for a moment that foreign terrorist organizations like Hezbollah don’t exploit situations like this simply don’t understand how the real underworld operates.”

As a man who combated human and drug trafficking in South and Central American jungles for decades, Braun would know how this world works.