“The migration is going into hyperdrive,” Anthony Rubin, owner of investigative journalist site Muckraker.com, told Gatestone this week. He was referring to individuals traveling by foot, boat, and truck to the U.S. southern border.
Those who want to cross the U.S. southern border and don’t live in this hemisphere usually fly to Quito because Ecuador allows visa-free entry to Chinese nationals and others, such as those from the Middle East and the Central Asian “stans.”
Migrants cross from Ecuador into Colombia and from there take one of three routes into the Darién Gap, a strip of jungle about 70 miles long, covering northern Colombia and southern Panama. The Pan-American Highway doesn’t run through the Gap, which separates Central America from South America.
As Mr. Rubin reported, the Chinese use the most expensive and the safest of the routes. He just traveled it with the migrants.
Chinese migrants usually start in Necoclí, Colombia, on the east side of the Gulf of Urabá, an inlet at the southern end of the Caribbean Sea. They take a boat to Acandí or Capurganá, on the other side of the gulf but still in Colombia. From there, they’re smuggled by boat into Panama, landing at Carreto.
Recently, Mr. Rubin saw 300 to 400 people at Carreto, the majority of them Chinese.
Migrants leave San Vicente for quick rides to and through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. The migrants cross each country illegally.
As Mr. Rubin noted, the Chinese are by no means the scariest in the caravan. He said that, in fact, he felt safest with the individuals from China.
The Chinese, after all, aren’t waging jihad.
Who is? The most confrontational of the groups in the caravan are military-aged Syrian males. Mr. Rubin also saw South Americans with markings indicating gang affiliations.
“I see aliens from over 100 countries,” war correspondent Michael Yon, who’s currently near the Darién Gap, told Gatestone, “including growing rivers of Chinese, Arabs of many sorts, Afghans of various sorts, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Iranians, Venezuelans, and on and on. By far, most are military-aged men unencumbered by impulse control or political correctness.”
There are definitely “people of interest” coming through. Some appear desperate to leave their homelands. Others, however, look as if they have malign intentions. When asked where they’re going, for instance, they clam up.
“In the first three years of the Biden administration, there have been at least 264 apprehensions on the U.S. southern border of persons on a terror watchlist,” Joseph Humire, of the Washington-based Center for a Secure Free Society, informed Gatestone. “This is a drastic increase from the four years of the Trump administration, when only 11 terror-watch list apprehensions took place on the southern border.”
As Mr. Humire, who spends time in Latin America, noted, these figures don’t include terrorists who are potentially part of the 1.5 million known “gotaways” at the southern border in the past three years. The Department of Homeland Security has a classification for irregular migrants coming from a terror-prone country: Special Interest Aliens (SIAs). The Border Patrol has encountered larger numbers of SIAs from, for instance, Syria.
Terrorists may now be entering the United States through another route. At the end of last month, 17 Chinese nationals landed at Key Largo, Florida, from Cuba.
Mr. Giménez, who sits on the House Committee on Homeland Security, told the British paper that Cuba may be working with the Chinese migrants to smuggle them into the United States. He’s undoubtedly right. It’s unlikely that individuals from China could organize a boat and head north to Florida without Havana’s help.
“It took only 19 terrorists to carry out 9/11,” he pointed out. “America is likely heading toward an era of increased terrorist attacks in the homeland.”
And President Joe Biden is welcoming the attackers onto U.S. soil.
