Years after Judicial Watch Exposes ISIS, Mexican Cartel Ties Media Finally Reports It

Nearly a decade after Judicial Watch exposed that Mexican drug cartels and Islamic terrorists have teamed up to smuggle foreigners into the United States through the southern border, the mainstream media is finally reporting it and the government has been forced to acknowledge it. A national news outlet revealed this week that a smuggler with ties to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) helped more than a dozen nationals from the Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic, enter the U.S. via Mexico. Under the Biden administration’s catastrophic open border policies, the Uzbek’s asked for asylum and remain in the country.

Now the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is probing the matter, according to the news report, which says that multiple sources confirmed a “scramble set off when US intelligence officials found that the migrants traveled with the help of a smuggler with ties to ISIS.” The incident was so serious that an urgent classified intelligence report was circulated to the president’s top cabinet officials in their morning briefing book and a flurry of urgent meetings among top national security and administration officials were initiated, the article states. Counterterrorism officials say the breach shows that the U.S. is “deeply vulnerable to the possibility that terrorists could sneak across the southern border.” That has already occurred as Judicial Watch reported years ago. Back in 2016 we uncovered an operation in which Mexican drug traffickers help Islamic terrorists stationed in Mexico cross into the U.S. to explore targets for future attacks. Among the jihadists that have traveled back and forth through the porous southwest border is a Kuwaiti named Shaykh Mahmood Omar Khabir, an ISIS operative who lives in the Mexican state of Chihuahua not far from El Paso, Texas.

All these years later a Biden administration spokeswoman from the National Security Council is quoted in this week’s news story trying to downplay the severity of the most recent security lapse, though other unidentified government officials reveal the migrants from Uzbekistan are still under FBI scrutiny as possible criminal threats. Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) took the event seriously enough to begin detaining, vetting, and expediting the removal of other migrants who also used the same ISIS-connected network. The government should properly screen every foreign national upon entering the U.S. rather than wait until a red flag arises once they are inside the country. Why does it take the involvement of an ISIS smuggler for federal authorities to go back and doublecheck illegal aliens already disbursed into unsuspecting communities throughout the nation?

The chilling reality is that Islamic terrorists have taken advantage of this lax security system for many years. Back in the spring of 2015 Judicial Watch reported about an ISIS camp operating just a few miles from El Paso, Texas in an area known as “Anapra” just west of 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. To the east of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, cartel-backed “coyotes” also smuggle ISIS terrorists through the porous border between Acala and Fort Hancock, Texas. The specific areas are exploited by ISIS because of their understaffed municipal and county police forces, and the safe havens they provide for the unchecked large-scale drug smuggling that was already ongoing.

The problem is almost certain to get worse as illegal immigration skyrockets under the Biden administration and its reckless open border policies facilitate the business model of Mexican drug cartels, also known as Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCO). Under Biden, the sophisticated criminal enterprises have seized unprecedented control of the southwest border, according to congressional testimony delivered recently by federal sources in counterterrorism, intelligence and drug enforcement.