Mexican Police Chief Unfazed by U.S. Alert; Arrival of Middle Easterners Going North is Normal

A recent U.S. alert warning Mexico of armed Iranians planning to enter the country through the southern border didn’t faze a busy Mexican border city’s police chief, who confirms the region is full of Middle Easterners, Africans and Asians heading north. In a Latin American news report published shortly after the U.S. issued the bulletin, Mexicali Police Chief María Elena Andrade Ramírez matter-of-factly said the arrival of people from the Middle East, Africa and Asia as well as the rest of the Americas is “normal” in her California border city of about a million residents. Nevertheless, the chief, who affirmed receiving the U.S. government bulletin, said she planned to cooperate and coordinate with state authorities to “reinforce security.”

The alert was issued a few days ago by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and largely ignored by the American and Mexican mainstream media. Only a few conservative media outlets in the U.S. reported about the warning after one obtained a DHS document outlining the threat. The document, issued by the Border Patrol’s regional intelligence operation center in Arizona, says that a Guatemalan national may try to smuggle five Middle Easterners—including a suicide bomber—into the U.S. through Mexico. The smuggler and four other men and a woman transited through Guatemala and Belize before reaching Veracruz, Mexico, according to the bulletin. The Guatemalan, whose name is redacted in the government document, was deported from California a year ago. The Spanish-language article linked above elaborates that American intelligence officials received the threat after picking up recordings distributed via social media. A Mexicali news story cites Mexican authorities downplaying the situation by assuring citizens that the arrival of people from the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Asia and the rest of the Americas is “something normal.”

This new norm creates a serious national security crisis along the famously porous southern border, though Islamic terrorists have long been present in Mexico. Judicial Watch has investigated and reported on it for years, uncovering several operations involving Mexican drug cartels joining forces with Islamic terrorists to enter the U.S. and carry out attacks. Back in the spring of 2015 Judicial Watch broke a story about an ISIS training facility just a few miles from the U.S. border near Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. At the time sources, including a Mexican Army field grade officer and a Mexican Federal Police Inspector, confirmed that “coyotes” engaged in human smuggling—and working for the Juárez Cartel— help move ISIS terrorists through the desert and across the border between Santa Teresa and Sunland Park, New Mexico. A few months later Judicial Watch exposed a separate scheme in which Mexican cartels smuggled foreigners from countries with terrorist ties into a small Texas rural town near El Paso, Texas.

A few years ago Judicial Watch obtained State Department documents showing that the government has long known that “Arab extremists” are entering the country through Mexico. Among them was a top Al Qaeda operative wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) during his cross-border jaunts. More recently, federal statistics show that unprecedented amounts migrants from terrorist nations, labeled Special Interest Aliens (SIA) by the government, are entering the U.S. via Mexico. A congressional probe completed in early 2019 found an astounding 300% increase in Bangladeshi nationals attempting to sneak into the country through Texas alone. Bangladesh is a south Asian Islamic country well known as a recruiting ground for terrorist groups such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda Indian Subcontinent (AQIS). Before the year ended Mexico confirmed that large groups of migrants from terrorist nations are in Tapachula awaiting asylum in the U.S. and federal authorities in Houston arrested a Mexican-based Bangladeshi smuggler and charged him with bringing in 15 fellow countrymen through the Texas-Mexico border.

When the Central American caravan got started in the fall of 2018, Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales confirmed that nearly 100 ISIS  terrorists had been apprehended in the impoverished Central American nation. Guatemala has long been known as a major smuggling corridor for foreigners from African, Asian and Middle Eastern countries making their way into the U.S. like the Iranians identified recently by the feds. No wonder Mexican authorities are unfazed.