Iran-Affiliated Venezuelan Gangs Invited Into the United States
by Robert Williams • December 19, 2024 at 5:00 am
"Border Patrol zones across Texas, Arizona and California had no agent presence for weeks and months at a time. Those who did not want to be caught could simply walk in. We have no idea who and what entered our country over this time." — Aaron Heitke, retired chief patrol agent for the San Diego Sector of the U.S. Border Patrol, testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security, September 18, 2024.
"Simultaneously, in San Diego we had an exponential increase in [Special] Interest Aliens (SIAs). These are aliens with significant ties to terrorism.... I was told I could not release any information on this increase in SIA's or mention any of the arrests. The administration was trying to convince the public that there was no threat at the border." — Aaron Heitke, testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security, September 18, 2024.
More than half a million Venezuelans have entered the US illegally since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Until Biden became president, few Venezuelans arrived illegally. Only around 4,500 arrived in 2020. After Biden's inauguration, however, numbers exploded: 50,499 Venezuelans illegally entered in 2021, another 189,520 in 2022 and a whopping 334,914 in 2023.
This means that Venezuelans now rank second in illegal immigration into the US, after Mexicans, who still take the number one spot.
For more than two decades, Venezuela has been a close ally of Iran, and a regional home base for Hezbollah, Iran's proxy in the Middle East. Hezbollah, according to one 2020 Atlantic Council report, helped to "turn Venezuela into a hub for the convergence of transnational organized crime and international terrorism."
