This story shows yet again what the Left wants you to forget, that immigration is a national security issue. This is true despite the fact that Mohammed Azharuddin Chhipa was not actually trying to get into the United States; he was an American citizen trying to evade detection by U.S. counterterror agents as he went abroad to join the jihad. But if the pipeline goes one way, it goes the other way as well.

“A Most-Wanted American Jihadist Caught in Mexico Was On His Way to Egypt, not the U.S. Border,” by Todd Bensman, Center for Immigration Studies, August 21, 2019 (thanks to the Geller Report):

On or about August 16, Mexico’s Federal Ministerial Police issued a rare and most curious public announcement: Mexican immigration had apprehended an American citizen who was wanted on an Interpol “blue notice” warrant on suspicion of supporting violent jihad and radical Islam on digital platforms.

The man, identified by Mexican media as “Mohammed Azharuddin Chhipa”, was found and arrested at a migrant detention center in the town of Huehuetan, just a few miles north of a heavily trammeled [sic] Guatemala border crossing for northward-moving U.S.-bound immigrants. Interpol blue notices are put out for international travelers that law enforcement suspects of involvement in a crime.

The U.S. national security concern about Chhipa was such that Mexico deported him by air to Washington D.C., no doubt into the hands of FBI counterterrorism investigators.

Absent further detail, an observer with just this knowledge might guess Chhipa was clandestinely returning home to America on the migrant trails from the Middle East battlefields of ISIS posing as a migrant, as did many dozens of European citizens to reach their home countries. But that is not the case, according to reliable intelligence community sources.

I was told that Chhipa actually was outbound from the United States and on his way toward a foreign jihadist group to join them, at least initially to Egypt. The reason Chhipa was traveling southward away from the United States was because he was on the American “no-fly” list and couldn’t depart from an American airport. He decided to find one somewhere unnamed in Latin America where no fly lists are not a thing, sources told me…

But while the idea that violent Islamic jihadists crossing into the United States at the southern border has inspired significant homeland security investment and programs, American jihadists have also sought to escape no-fly list restrictions and law enforcement detection by traveling southward over the same border to get to the jihad overseas….

And while we still don’t know much about which American city this suspect called home or how his life came to this, it’s safe to assume the FBI had this man on its radar for quite a while before realizing he was gone. Hey, it happens.