Former President Trump hinted at some of the topics he will likely discuss more during his campaign and the debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on September 10 at a Fox News town hall on Wednesday.
Trump made the claim that “more terrorists have come into the United States in the last three years” while discussing the US southern border. After what seemed like half a century.
This seems like a strange assertion to make as we approach the 23rd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, when over 3,000 people were killed, most of them in Trump’s hometown of New York City, by 19 Arab hijackers who hadn’t crossed the southern border into the US.
Moreover, wouldn’t we have seen terrorist strikes in the United States if, as Trump asserted, Islamic terrorists had been flooding into the country over the previous three years? Or, at the very least, a dramatic increase in the number of terrorists apprehended in the United States throughout the same time period?
Actually, Islamist terrorists who have crossed the southern border into the United States have not carried out any terrorist strikes in the last three years.
While Trump was in office in 2019, a Saudi military officer murdered three American sailors at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. The killer had lawfully entered the US as part of a Pentagon training program.
Meanwhile, data collected by the research institution New America (where I am a vice president) shows that 22 individuals have been murdered in the US in the last three years by domestic far-right terrorists in areas like Allen, Texas, and Buffalo, New York.
When far-right domestic terrorists carry out terrorist attacks in the US, the usually outspoken Trump usually stays silent.
Also during his time in office, Trump denied reports of “radical Islamic terror” at a Fox town hall meeting. But both the Pensacola and the 2017 attacks in Manhattan, where a terrorist inspired by ISIS used a truck to murder eight people, occurred during Trump’s administration.
In his 2016 campaign, Trump called for a Muslim ban, which merged the general American fear of immigration with the irrational fear of terrorists that many have carried with them since the 9/11 attacks. In 2024, this fear will be reimagined as the “terrorists crossing the southern border” trope.
Certainly, there are valid worries regarding the southern border. For example, according to AWN’s reporting in June, eight Tajikistan nationals were apprehended on immigration charges “following the discovery of potential ties to terrorism,” which may have included ISIS. But there was zero proof that these guys were planning a terrorist strike.
In addition, last year, FBI director Christopher Wray spoke before the US Senate Judiciary Committee, expressing his concerns about the increased threat posed by foreign terrorist organizations. He listed several reasons for this, including their ability to exploit any area of entry, including our southwest border. ‘Known or suspected terrorists,’ or KSTs, have been trying to cross more frequently in the past five years.
There have been 43 “encounters” with individuals on the terrorism watch list along the southern border in 2024 thus far, according to the latest information from US Customs and Border Protection.
In 2024, there were 281 incidents involving individuals on the terrorism watchlist along the US-Canada border, according to Customs and Border Protection Patrol. Despite the fact that there has been an approximately sixfold increase in the number of individuals on the terrorism watch list attempting to cross the Canadian border this year, Trump has refrained from requesting strict immigration enforcement measures.
Also, just because your name is on the terrorism watch list doesn’t indicate you’re a terrorist. CBS News estimates that around two million individuals are on this list.
On Fox, Trump claimed that “more terrorists have come into the United States in the last three years,” but this is quite different. There was zero Islamic terrorist attacks on American soil during his four years in administration, and I estimate that number to be closer to fifty.
But if history is any indication, Trump will most certainly make identical assertions in the latter weeks of the campaign.