article dated 04/28/2016

The need to close America’s porous southern border was given greater urgency this week after reports that an ISIS suspect plotted to escort operatives across the border and drug cartels are helping ISIS set up a base near El Paso, Texas.

Federal prosecutors say a 21-year-old Somali-American planned to open up routes to the U.S. through Mexico so ISIS terrorists based in Syria could penetrate the U.S. border and attack American cities

The FBI secretly recorded Omar and his cell mate discussing several times the possibility of attacks in the U.S, as well as murdering an FBI agent. Images from the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, as well as that of Osama bin Laden, were found on Omar’s phone.

Most chilling was the account of a plot to help ISIS fighters from Syria infiltrate the U.S. through Mexico, which wouldn’t be hard to do thanks to the lack of border enforcement by the Obama administration.

Under Obama's loose immigration policies, which allow removable aliens to remain in the country, many illegal immigrants who commit additional crimes while in the U.S. are being ignored, even though local police have urged ICE to take control of criminals in their jails and kick them out of the country.

According to newly obtained government figures, ICE last year opted not to deport but to release 19,723 criminal illegal immigrants, including 208 convicted murderers, more than 900 convicted sex offenders and 12,307 convicted drunk drivers.

Overall, those released into virtually every U.S. state carried a total of 64,197 convictions among them, or an average of 3.25 convictions each, according to a Center for Immigration Studies analysis. The data also reveal that the released group committed a total of 8,234 violent crimes.

It's not known how many of these released immigrant felons are members of dangerous gangs, such as MS-13, or affiliated with terrorists groups. But many go on to commit additional crimes after they are released into the general U.S. population.

And there is new evidence that drug gangs have formed alliances with terrorist groups such as ISIS.

According to a Judicial Watch, a Washington-based government watchdog agency, Mexican drug traffickers are helping ISIS terrorists stationed in Mexico cross into the U.S. to explore targets for future attacks.

Among the jihadists that travel back and forth through the porous southern 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,” Judicial Watch said in a new report quoting Homeland Security sources. "Khabir trained hundreds of al-Qaida fighters in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen, and has lived in Mexico for more than a year.”

He reportedly now trains thousands of men -- mostly Syrians and Yemenis -- to fight at an ISIS base near Juarez.

Staking out U.S. targets is not hard for Khabir, who actually bragged in an Italian newspaper article published earlier this month that the U.S. border is so open that he “could get in with a handful of men, and kill thousands of people in Texas or in Arizona in the space of a few hours.”

A top Mexican diplomat says in the article she can't understand why the Obama regime is “culpably neglecting this phenomenon,” adding that “this new wave of fundamentalism could have nasty surprises in store for the United States.”

Neither can we. That wall can’t come soon enough.

https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/isis-plotting-to-infiltrate-open-u-s-border/