Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) would have allowed several of the terrorists who killed nearly 3,000 people in New York and Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001, to have remained in the United States illegally.

That is the logical conclusion to be drawn from her comment on Monday at an immigration roundtable in New York that there seemed to be no “point” or “purpose” to enforcing the country’s immigration laws other than at the border.

Pelosi said:

When I saw that the president was going to have these [Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE] raids, it was so appalling, it’s outside the circle of civilized human behavior to just be kicking down doors, splitting up families, and the rest of that, in addition to the injustices that are happening at the border. We have legislation to go forward to address those needs. But in terms of interior enforcement, what is the purpose? What’s the point?

“Well — I won’t even go into what the motivation might be for that here, because this is not a political event,” she added, hinting at a repeated accusation of racism.

The president delayed ICE raids that were to have taken place Sunday morning, targeting 2,000 illegal aliens around the country who had already been ordered to be deported. He said he wished to give Congress two weeks to find a legislative solution to the country’s existing, flawed asylum laws, which encourage illegal crossings over the border.

The 9/11 Commission found that while all of the Al Qaeda terrorists entered the country legally, several had been eligible for deportation: “During their stays in the United States, at least six of the [nineteen] 9/11 hijackers violated immigration laws.” Two had overstayed their visas at the time of the attack.

Arresting even one could have thwarted the plot. But Pelosi does not see the point or purpose of interior enforcement.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.