Washington, D.C. (August 29, 2023) – During a reporting trip to the Darien Gap area along the Panama-Colombia border, the Center's National Security Fellow, Todd Bensman, conducted an exclusive interview with Director General Jorge Gobea, chief of Panama's National Border Service (SENAFRONT), and Edward Dolan, a former Homeland Security Investigations agent.
The interview confirmed that numerous U.S.-bound terror suspects have been apprehended in the region, with more expected to make their way to the U.S. border. In addition, Gobea said only a tiny fraction of migrants coming through the Darien can be screened because of the flood unleashed by the Biden-Harris border policies. An excerpt from Bensman's interviews is provided below:
Asked to comment about SENAFRONT’s reported August arrest of three Afghan terror suspects whose biometrics were taken and checked at a Darien Province immigrant reception station (described in the SENAFRONT tweet below), Gobea responded that the report was “not fake”.
“We did take and profile a few members of a terrorist cell from … Afghanistan,” he said. “We linked and we profiled them to be members of an active cell. They were members of a Salafist group, and they had links with different activities.”
But then Gobea added that this was far from a one-off.
“We have many stories of that. We don’t just have one. We have many stories of that, from Somalia, from Yemen … from Syria, from Africa.”
Gobea would not put a number on the “many stories”.
. . .
"Clearly, however, many ["active terrorist" migrants] are too long gone and don’t get caught until they hit the American border, if ever. On August 5, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee issued an interim report revealing that since January 2021, CPB released into the United States “at least” 99 border-crossing immigrants who were on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist database.
The entire multinational counterterrorism net now stands reduced in capability, and the bad guys know it, Dolan said.
“If you’re a terrorist,” he said. “this is how you’re going to come to the United States.”
Bensman's full piece detailing the interviews can be found here.
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