Kansas Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach — who worked in the Justice Department investigating the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — says three of the four hijacked planes “would have been stopped” if U.S. immigration laws had been properly and effectively enforced.

In an interview with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow on SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Daily, Kobach retold his experience at the Justice Department after the 9/11 attacks, which he says left him with “some numbers that defined my career.”

Kobach said:

One of the most astounding things that we learned in the weeks and months after 9/11, when we started investigating the patterns, the travel, the actions of the terrorist cohorts that pulled this horrific attack off, and here’s some numbers that defined my career … there were 19 hijackers. All 19 came in legally. Most of them on visitor for pleasure visas and student visas. [Emphasis added]

Of those 19, five became illegal aliens, most of them by overstaying their visas. At that point, they are arrestable and removable from the United States. Of those five, who were illegal aliens, four of the five were pulled over for speeding violations or other traffic violations. So at that point, you had four of the terrorist cohort who could have been arrested … if it had popped up saying these individuals were high-risk aliens who are aliens in the United States, they could have maybe arrested them. [Emphasis added]

Here’s the last number, of those four missed opportunities to make an arrest, three were pilots. So three of the four planes on 9/11 would have been stopped from taking off and thousands of lives saved if the local police had that information pop up on their screen when they were issuing those traffic tickets. [Emphasis added]

All Americans should be aware of that. We had the opportunity to stop the 9/11 hijackers, but because state and local police didn’t have the information they needed, it didn’t happen. [Emphasis added]