America's Covert Border War by Todd Bensman

Author:Todd Bensman [Bensman, Todd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2020-12-08T16:47:18+00:00

Sikh Indian migrants on their way to the US border. Photo by Todd Bensman in Costa Rica, December 2018

American Asylum’s Pedestal in the Smuggling Business Model

The FBI discovered Dhakane, not the US immigration system, just as European counterterrorism police—and not the European immigration systems—had uncovered its terrorists. The asylum process is poorly geared to ferret out national security threats, and those who administer it often don’t even pretend to try. This should change.

Even the post-9/11 SIA security screens failed to catch Dhakane (or, evidently, any of the AIAI terrorists he smuggled in).

As part of normal SIA security practices already in place for several years in 2008, FBI and ICE agents would have interviewed Dhakane (as best they would any SIA) and also run terrorism database checks that would have found nothing. They wouldn’t, of course, because the anarchic state of Somalia had completely failed in 1991, leaving the country with no government to collect verifiable criminal and terrorism intelligence records, let alone to issue birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, driver’s licenses, or passports. Many Muslim-majority countries are in similar straits, to varying degrees. Dhakane must have felt very assured knowing the agents would back-check his story against a void. If failed statehood is an impediment to American intelligence collection, so are diplomatic estrangements. American investigators can’t very well pick up the phone and call, say the US-embargoed, US-designated State Sponsor of Terror nation of Iran, to have them run a quick background check on Iranians caught at the southern border (and quite a few are). There’s no one at all to pick up the phone in a place like Libya.

As in Europe’s system, the men and women who administer US asylum processes, from credible fear interviews to immigration court hearings, simply are not geared to investigate and verify the stories told to them; lies are just as impossible to suss out as truths are to verify. Gambling that only good ones get through is the standard. Empirically verifying any given claimant’s story in distant ungoverned spaces is next to impossible.

A February 2011 Texas Department of Public Safety Intelligence Analysis of the Dhakane case, released by WikiLeaks, succinctly summarized the problem.22

“As Dhakane’s personal experience demonstrates, the political asylum process is vulnerable to abuse by individuals associated with terrorist organizations who seek to hide those associations. Because Somalia has no government, it is often described as a failed state, its citizens either travel with no identification or forged ones. These circumstances render US authorities unable to easily verify claims or check backgrounds against terrorist watch lists, forcing the release of inadequately vetted individuals into the general public.”

The SIAs, their smugglers, and terrorists like Dhakane count on that for business continuity.

For SIAs from homes thousands of miles away, like Afghanistan and Syria, their first chance across is often their only chance. Whereas Mexicans who can go home and come back relatively easily don’t usually succeed in claims for political asylum on the basis of racial, religious, or political persecution,23 SIAs almost always seek political asylum and come from countries with plenty of real problems to cite.

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