Todd Bensman of the San Antonio Express-News has written a four-part series on a human smuggling ring from the Middle East into the United States. The entire series is well worth the read, but I’ll quote one important excerpt.

“They are not all economic migrants,” said attorney Janice Kephart, who served as legal counsel for the 9-11 Commission and co-wrote its final staff report. “I do get frustrated when people who live in Washington or Illinois say we don’t have any evidence that terrorists are coming across. But there is evidence.”

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehension numbers, agents along both borders have caught more than 5,700 special-interest immigrants since 2001. But as many as 20,000 to 60,000 others are presumed to have slipped through, based on rule-of-thumb estimates typically used by homeland security agencies.

“You’d like to think at least you’re catching one out of 10,” McCraw said. “But that’s not good in baseball and it’s certainly not good in counterterrorism.”

This human pipeline, Bensman reports, is embedded in Syria and flows through Texas which coincides with a local report I read documenting a South Texas sheriff holding up patches torn off the clothes of IRGC officers.  Yep, that’s Iran’s special unit. There have been known terrorists who crossed the southern border that have been caught, but how many escaped capture?

This is the concern that should be front and center in Washington today, yet we all know the ridiculous calls of racism and the terror-denying open border advocated have turned the debate on end.

Read Bensman’s full report.