Just ahead of the midterm elections, in the fall of 2018, a caravan of more than seven thousand migrants, mostly from Central America, was wending its way north through Mexico toward the southern border. This was a political gift to President Trump who had, of course, run on a “get-tough on immigration and terrorism” platform during his presidential campaign.
Trump tweeted that “unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in” with the thousands of migrants. The intent of this tweet was surely to play on American fears about the possibility of mysterious Middle Easterners attacking the country, as they had on 9/11. Of course, the notion of a Middle Eastern terrorist joining a caravan of migrants who were covered by TV reporters almost continuously for many weeks was implausible on its face.
There was another problem with this notion: all the lethal terrorist attacks in the United States since 9/11 were carried out by US citizens or legal residents. In addition, of the more than four hundred jihadist terrorism cases prosecuted in the United States since 9/11, not one of the terrorists had infiltrated the country across the southern border. And the State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism observed in 2017 that there was “no credible information that any member of a terrorist group has traveled through Mexico to gain access to the United States.”
The Trump administration framed the necessity of a southern border wall, in part, as a response to a purported national security emergency involving terrorists. This was hogwash. The year 2018 saw one of the lowest annual numbers of jihadist terrorism cases in the United States—nineteen—since the rise of ISIS. The largest number of such cases was in 2015 when there were eighty. While the number of terrorism cases wasn’t an exact proxy for levels of threat, it certainly said something about the scale of the threat. The United States had seen a steep decline in the number of jihadist terrorism cases by 2018.
In the days before the 2018 elections, Fox News anchors and Trump started whipping up hysteria about the approaching caravan. Fox & Friends cohost Pete Hegseth claimed that the caravan of asylum seekers “looks a lot more like an invasion than anything else.” Trump tweeted, “This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!”
The paranoia surrounding the migrants’ caravan had lethal consequences. Ten days before the midterm elections, on October 27, Robert Bowers murdered eleven worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Before he carried out the massacre at the synagogue, Bowers posted frequently about the migrants making their way through Mexico. Adopting Trump’s language, Bowers repeatedly called them “invaders.” Bowers also posted multiple anti-Semitic rants on the Gab social media network. Bowers blamed the Jewish philanthropist George Soros for financing the migrant caravan, which was a common conspiracy theory among a virulent minority of Trump’s supporters.
In early January 2019, Chris Wallace of Fox News interviewed Sarah Sanders, the then–White House press secretary, and challenged her on the supposed terrorist threat at the southern border. Sanders asserted, “We know that 4,000 known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally and we know that the most vulnerable point of entry is at our southern border.”
This was a misleading statistic since these four thousand individuals were not terrorists but had shown up as a “hit” on a watch list of more than a million and a half individuals who were deemed to have some possible link to terrorism. The four thousand people turned away from entering the US were those who may have had some kind of putative connection to terrorism. They were not proven terrorists, otherwise they would have been arrested and charged. And there wasn’t a case since 9/11 of a terrorist being arrested at the border.
Since 9/11, three foreign terrorist organizations had mounted serious plots to attack the United States, and all the plotters flew into the country from South Asia and the Middle East. None of them crossed over the United States–Mexico border. Najibullah Zazi was trained by al-Qaeda to blow up bombs in the Manhattan subway in 2009. He arrived in the United States from Pakistan by plane. So too did Faisal Shahzad, whom the Pakistani Taliban trained to blow up a bomb in Manhattan a year later. Neither plot succeeded.
“Underwear Bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab flew into the country on Christmas Day 2009 on the plane that he tried unsuccessfully to blow up over Detroit. Al-Qaeda in Yemen had trained him.
The only cross-border infiltration by a terrorist was two years before 9/11 when Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian, was arrested on a ferry arriving in Washington State from Canada on December 14, 1999. As Ressam’s car rolled out of the ferry, a US customs inspector pulled him over. Agents found more than one hundred pounds of explosives in Ressam’s car. Ressam planned to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. Despite the Ressam case, fomenting fears of terrorists crossing the border from Canada hadn’t gained much political traction in the United States.
Trump kept pushing the conspiracy theory that mysterious Middle Easterners were crossing the southern border, tweeting on January 18, 2019, “Border rancher: ‘We’ve found prayer rugs out here. It’s unreal.’ . . . People coming across the Southern Border from many countries, some of which would be a big surprise.” Trump linked to a story in the conservative Washington Examiner that cited an anonymous rancher in New Mexico who had supposedly found the prayer rugs. Oddly, there were no photos of the rugs.
John Kelly, having been commander of SOUTHCOM under Obama and then head of the Department of Homeland Security for Trump, understood the issues about the southern border well. Kelly often said privately that “the wall” was a misnomer and that it would not run from “sea to shining sea” as Trump often claimed. In fact, there was no need for a physical wall in many sections of the border where there were inhospitable deserts or American Indian reservations.
Kelly told Trump that the wall “wasn’t the Maginot Line,” the defensive line of fortresses and concrete fortifications the French had built after World War I on their eastern border to try to prevent the Germans from invading France. “The wall” wasn’t really a wall; it was better border infrastructure. Of course, “Build better border infrastructure” wasn’t quite as catchy a slogan as “Build the wall!”
In the end, only around sixty miles of wall—or to be more precise, steel bollard fence—were built during the first two and a half years of Trump’s presidency. Despite all of Trump’s rhetoric about combating the invading immigrants from the south, the number of migrants trying to cross the southern border was at a thirteen-year high in 2019.
The real issue wasn’t the lack of a southern border wall from the Atlantic to the Pacific but the appalling conditions in the Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, which had some of the world’s highest homicide rates and were riven by drug violence and gangs. The migrants from Central America were fleeing the desperate conditions in their countries and were willing to make the long and often dangerous trek to the United States to take their chances there. Building better border infrastructure wasn’t going to do much of anything to stem the flow of Central American asylum seekers.
The Trump administration’s counterterrorism strategy correctly observed that the United States had “long faced a persistent security threat from domestic terrorists who are not motivated by a radical Islamist ideology but are instead motivated by other forms of violent extremism.” The most lethal terrorist attack against Hispanics in American history was a bleak reminder of this. Patrick Cursius, a twenty-one-year-old white man shot and killed twenty-two people at a Walmart in Texas on August 3, 2019. Minutes before the attack, the shooter had posted a manifesto on 8chan, an online message board often featuring racist postings, about his support for the terrorist who had killed fifty-one worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, five months earlier. Just as school shooters learn from other school shooters, terrorists also learn from other terrorists. The terrorist who carried out the Christchurch attack had posted his own manifesto to 8chan just before he carried out the attacks at the mosques.
The online manifesto by the El Paso shooter referred to a purported Hispanic invasion of Texas as the rationale for his terrorist attack. As mentioned above, Trump had also described immigrants coming across the southern border as an “invasion.” However, in the manifesto, the shooter said that his views about immigrants had predated Trump becoming president.
With the 22 fatalities in the El Paso attack, terrorists motivated by far-right ideology had killed 109 people in the United States since the 9/11 attacks, while jihadist militants had killed 104. Trump needed to recognize that the threat posed by far-right terrorists was of a similar scope to that posed by jihadist terrorists and that he should use the bully pulpit of his presidency to attack the ideological underpinnings of right-wing violence—rather than stoking its flames.
To his credit, two days after the El Paso attack Trump made formal remarks at the White House in which he condemned “racism, bigotry and white supremacy.” This was the teleprompter Trump. Would he return to being the president who trafficked in white identity politics when he was back on Twitter or addressing one of his raucous rallies? By the end of the summer of 2019 the answer was obvious.