Trump’s claim terrorists are pouring over southern border does not stand up to scrutiny

(CNN) — At a Fox News town hall on Wednesday, former President Donald Trump previewed some of the themes that we will likely hear more from him on the campaign trail and during his September 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Discussing the US southern border, Trump asserted that “more terrorists have come into the United States in the last three years. And I think probably 50 years.”

As we approach the 23^rd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, this seems like an odd claim to make when 19 Arab hijackers, none of whom had crossed the southern border into the US, killed almost 3,000 people, the vast majority of them in Trump’s hometown of New York City.

And if it were really the case that jihadist terrorists were pouring across America’s southern border during the past three years as Trump claimed, wouldn’t there have been, you know, some terrorist attacks in the US as a result?  Or, at the very least, a lot more terrorists being arrested in the US during that same time frame?

In fact, there have been no reported terrorist attacks in the US during the past three years carried out by jihadist terrorists crossing the southern border.

Indeed, the most recent lethal terrorist attack by a jihadist terrorist happened when Trump himself was in office in 2019 when a Saudi military officer killed three American sailors at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, and he had arrived legally in the US as part of a Pentagon training program.

Meanwhile, during the past three years, 22 people have been murdered in the United States by far-right domestic terrorists in places such as Buffalo, New York, and Allen, Texas, according to data collected by New America, a research institution (where I am a vice president.)

The ordinarily voluble Trump typically doesn’t have much to say when far-right domestic terrorists perpetrate terrorism in the United States.

At the Fox town hall, Trump also claimed that there were no acts of “radical Islamic terror” while he was president. Yet, the Pensacola terrorist attack happened on Trump’s watch, as did the attack in Manhattan in 2017 by an ISIS-inspired terrorist who killed eight people using a truck as a weapon.

The ‘terrorists crossing the southern border’ trope is a 2024 remix of Trump’s call for a Muslim ban during the 2016 election campaign, which conflated Americans’ widespread concerns about immigration with their fear of terrorism, which since the 9/11 attacks has been imprinted on many American’s minds.

To be sure, there are reasonable concerns about the southern border, like the fact that, as CNN reported in June, eight Tajikistan nationals in the US who had crossed the southern border were arrested on immigration charges “following the discovery of potential ties to terrorism,” including possibly to ISIS. There was, however, no evidence these men were plotting a terrorist attack.

Also, FBI director Christopher Wray testified last year before the US Senate Judiciary Committee, “I am concerned that we are in … a heightened threat environment from foreign terrorist organizations for a whole host of reasons and obviously their ability to exploit any port of entry, including our southwest border … We have seen an increase in so-called KSTs, ‘known or suspected terrorists,’ attempting to cross over the last five years.”

It is the case that according to the US Customs and Border Protection’s most recent statistics, in 2024 so far, there were 43 “encounters” with people on the terrorism watch list on the southern border.

Also, in 2024, Customs and Border Protection Patrol had 281 encounters with people on the terrorism watchlist on the US border with Canada. Yet, Trump is not calling for draconian immigration enforcement for people crossing the Canadian border, even though so far this year around six times more people on the terrorism watch list tried to cross that border.

Also, being on the terrorism watch list doesn’t mean you are a terrorist; CBS News has reported that there are some two million people on it.

This is all a far cry from Trump’s claim on Fox that “more terrorists have come into the United States in the last three years. And I think probably 50 years” and that there was no Islamist terrorism in the US during the four years he was in office.

However, if past performance is predictive of future performance, Trump will likely make similar claims during the final weeks of the election campaign.

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