It’s a full-blown crisis. It’s always been a crisis. For border towns and states, the officials here would argue that it’s been a problem for the past twenty years. Illegal alien apprehensions saw a 32 percent increase last month, with around 144,000 arrested by immigration enforcement officials. The Department of Homeland Security is running out of money to handle this crisis. We cannot process any more of these migrants—most of which have exploited our lax asylum laws that need to be changed. They won’t as long as Democrats control the House. Katie wrote about the border crisis figures yesterday and even former Obama officials are starting to admit—this is a problem. It’s real. It’s not a manufactured crisis, which the consensus among brain dead Democrats on the Hill. And now, we have national security concerns. I mean there always were national security issues with these hordes of people overwhelming the Border Patrol, but, to no one’s surprise, radical Islamic terrorism is on the radar. Based on a confession by a captured ISIS fighter, the organization plotted to infiltrate the U.S. using English-speaking, western-looking operatives (via Fox News):

CBP continues to face a worsening crisis at the Southwest border. In May, CBP apprehended or deemed inadmissible 144,278 individuals along the SWB—a 32% increase over the previous month. Details here: https://t.co/ru9AsalgPb pic.twitter.com/p8kcr5lZ7Y — CBP (@CBP) June 5, 2019

A chilling confession from a captured ISIS fighter has shed light on how the terrorist group intended to exploit the vulnerabilities of the U.S. border with Mexico, using English speakers and westerners to take advantage of smuggling routes and target financial institutions. Seized ISIS fighter Abu Henricki, a Canadian citizen with dual citizenship with Trinidad, last month said that he was sought out by the violent insurgency’s leadership to attack the U.S. from a route starting in Central America, according to a study by the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE) and published in Homeland Security Today. “ISIS has organized plots in Europe with returnees so it seems entirely plausible that they wanted to send guys out to attack. The issue that makes a North American attack harder is the travel is more difficult from Syria,” Anne Speckhard, who co-conducted the study as the director of ICSVE and Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University, told Fox News. “So the idea that they would instead use people who were not known to their own governments as having joined ISIS might make it possible for them to board airplanes.” […] He [Henricki] further elaborated that he believed the scheme was aimed at New York financial targets. “They wanted to use these people (to attack inside the U.S.) because they were from these areas,” Henricki told the scholars, indicating that they were either from North America or were English speakers. […] Henricki then claimed he refused the mission and was subsequently thrown into an ISIS prison in Manbij and brutally tortured. His wife, also a Canadian, was also imprisoned in a women’s department and endured psychological torture. “This plot is likely dead as those who were pressured to join it are according to Abu Henricki now all dead and ISIS is in retreat as we know," Speckhard said. "That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t disregard that it was a plot. We should take thoughtful steps to prevent. "We often hear about terrorists trying to enter the southern border in political debate, but I rarely have come across a real case. It surprised me to hear this was a real plot by ISIS to exploit our southern border. That’s concerning of course.”

Yes, luckily, the Trump administration had taken a sledgehammer to the Islamic State, virtually wiping them off the map in terms of held territory, but as with all of these cases, just because they no longer have significant strongholds or held territory, doesn’t mean these people just vanish into the ether. The same goes for state actors, like the Soviets, these people just didn’t vanish just because the Berlin Wall collapsed, something that Paul Weyrich, co-founder of The Heritage Foundation once said, citing Yegor Gaidar, the former acting prime minister under Yeltsin. And yet, the Democrats on the Hill want to do nothing to help deal with this crisis. So, when people ask why Trump is pushing hard on tariffs, well—what other tools does he have? Congress won’t give them to him.