Fox News host Neil Cavuto pressed White House spokesman John Kirby on Monday about Hamas sympathizers sneaking through the U.S.-Mexico border after a deadly terrorist attack in Israel.
The Justice Department secured an indictment against Sohaib Abuayyash, a 20-year-old Palestinian who was in the United States illegally, on a federal firearms charge Friday. “Do you feel there’s a threat that some nefarious elements, including Hamas members or those sympathetic or inspired by Hamas, to do the same thing here?” Cavuto asked Kirby, referencing the Oct. 7 attack on multiple locations in southern Israel carried out by the radical Islamic terrorist group, and he added: “That maybe they snuck through the border and are here?”
An Oct. 20 memo from the San Diego Field Office Intelligence Division of Customs and Border Protection warned that Hamas and Hezbollah could be infiltrating into the United States through the U.S.-Mexico border.
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Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas was unable to say how many members of the radical Islamic terrorist organizations may have entered the United States through the southern border during testimony at a Senate hearing Tuesday.
“We work in close contact with the Department of Homeland Security and our border patrol agencies to make sure that we can control and vet and to minimize any threat of terrorism coming through our borders, wherever the borders are, maritime or land,” Kirby claimed. “We do that very, very stringently. The process is constantly under review to make sure that we can minimize that threat 100%.”
Over 2.45 million people have been encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border during fiscal year 2023, according to data released by United States Customs and Border Protection, following 2,378,944 encounters in fiscal year 2022 and 1,734,686 in fiscal year 2021.
“A lot of people do slip through that border, John and the feeling is that given the wider number of countries that are doing so, used to be three or four, up to a dozen, right now better than 140 countries represented going through there, are you worried that this is a huge issue now?” Cavuto asked.
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“We’re always concerned about homeland security and making sure that our borders are secure as possible,” Kirby claimed. “That’s one reason the president continues to urge for more money at the border to help us with asylum courts and to help us add more border patrol agents on the ground to improve our technological capabilities there.”
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