Why Isn’t Homeland Security Monitoring A Muslim-Only Immigrant Shelter At The US Border?

In October, U.S. Border Patrol caught another nine border-crossing immigrants who were on the FBI’s terrorism watch list, adding to the already record-breaking 98 during the just-ended fiscal 2022 and 14 during the prior fiscal year.

Those 121 suspected terrorist border crossings should strike President Joe Biden’s homeland security establishment and the general public as a “system blinking red” moment, to requote the infamous 9/11 Commission Report line about failures to act on threat information.

But my recent fact-finding trip to Mexico’s first and only shelter that expressly caters to U.S.-bound Muslim immigrants indicated Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sees no blinking red lights amid this current mass-migration border crisis.

In June 2022, the San Diego-based Latina Muslim Foundation noticed significant enough numbers of U.S.-bound travelers from the Islamic world to justify opening the Albergue Assabil/Mesquijta Taybah shelter in a two-story, 8,000-square-foot former nightclub in Tijuana just two blocks from the border wall, which all who stay there intend to bypass one way or another. The shelter serves as a waystation for 30 to 140 immigrants at a time coming from Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Somalia, Chechnya, and other regions in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia where terrorist organizations operate.

Latina Muslim Foundation Director Sonia Garcia told me she is concerned that Islamic terrorists may use her Tijuana shelter and does her best to ferret them out during interviews. She’ll even call in Mexican law enforcement authorities to investigate deceptive and suspicious persons. Mexican authorities recommended that she reject two of them for shelter assistance on terrorism grounds.

Albergue Assabil/Mesquijta Taybah shelter, Tijuana, Mexico (Photo by Todd Bensman)

“I’m not the person who is going to hide the reality of what people do, regardless of their religion,” Garcia said. “Just because they are Muslims, [we] are not going to let them come to the United States or Mexico to hurt people. That’s it. We’re not into that. We’re just here to help people.”

In ordinary times, when a historic-sized mass migration crisis is not raging, clientele like hers would bring the shelter more attention from law enforcement. That’s because, for more than 15 years, American homeland security has officially tagged U.S.-bound immigrants from such countries as “special interest aliens.” The SIA tag is supposed to trigger bilateral law enforcement and counterterrorism screening with Mexico to investigate them further.

Mexico Collaborates When Manageable

As noted in my book “America’s Covert Border War, The Untold Story of the Nation’s Battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration,” Mexico’s collaboration with the United States on counterterrorism has been extensive and to great effect — in non-crisis times when human flows are manageable.

Mexican intelligence often runs the names of special interest aliens through American security databases and allows U.S. officers into detention facilities to interview many of them — before they can cross. Mexican customs officers working in Mexican airports also run identities of arriving special interest aliens through U.S. databases. Mexico has proven sensitive to U.S. requests that

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