Afghan national tied to Taliban, attack plot smuggled into US Through Mexico

An Afghan national with ties to the Taliban — and a plot to carry out a terror attack somewhere in North America — was caught last fall after being smuggled into the U.S. from Mexico, an incident sure to further inflame the debate over national security risks at the border.

The Afghan national’s alleged terror ties were not initially flagged in a terror database – and as a result, not initially reported – when the incident first came to light last November, according to Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., who obtained Homeland Security documents on the incident. It was only later that U.S. officials discovered his associations.

Hunter told Fox News on Friday that the database disconnect represents a “monumental failure.” 

“We don’t know who’s coming into the U.S. and what they’re bringing with them,” he told Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.” “It is as bad as it seems.”

The new details were first reported by The Washington Times.

According to information shared with FoxNews.com by Hunter’s office, the Afghan in question was picked up and detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents about 15 miles inside Arizona from the border. He was arrested along with five Pakistani citizens and two Mexicans identified as smugglers.

The Afghan claimed he crossed into the U.S. on Nov. 13, 2015 by crawling under a border fence near Nogales, Ariz. But an initial check in one of the terror databases apparently did not flag him.

As a result, all six illegal immigrants – from what are known as “special interest” countries – were cleared by the National Targeting Center.

According to a letter sent Wednesday from Hunter to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, all six were initially served with an “Expedited Removal.” The Afghan national “sought U.S. immigration benefits, and was processed as having credible fear after he stated his life was in danger,” Hunter wrote.

However, according to the letter, the individual was in fact identified in a separate database, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), as having terror ties.

Hunter wrote that the individual was said to be “involved in a plot to conduct an attack in the U.S. and/or Canada and has family ties to members of the Taliban.”

For an unknown reason, the individual was not initially watch-listed in the separate Terrorist Screening Database, according to the letter – and so these associations were not initially noticed.    

Officials apparently noticed the error in time, as the individual remains in U.S. custody in Arizona.

But Hunter said in his letter to Johnson that his understanding is the whereabouts of the other men arrested that day “is unknown.” Hunter asked DHS for additional details.

Hunter also pushed back Friday on the notion that the incident could represent a success since the Afghan national was ultimately apprehended and later flagged.

“You can assume that others have gotten through,” Hunter told Fox News.

The information shared with FoxNews.com showed at least a dozen illegal immigrants from Afghanistan and Pakistan have either made it across the U.S. border or gotten close, dating back to 2014.

The Washington Times reported that the incident last fall involved a Brazilian-based smuggling network.

The Afghan national in question apparently took a complicated route, essentially around the world and then through Latin America, to arrive in Arizona. He told officials he left Afghanistan in 2015 and then traveled from Dubai to Brazil. From there, he moved up through Peru and other South American countries before traveling through Central America.

In August 2015, he was apprehended in Panama but was released when “no derogatory information” on him was found. He continued his journey, crossing into the U.S. in November before being detected, along with his group, by Border Patrol.

The apprehensions were reported at the time.

However, the local reports, based on comments from border officials, also said no “derogatory information” turned up when their names were run through security databases.

“The American people would have had no clue on this if we didn’t get these documents from Homeland Security,” Hunter said Friday.

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Hillary's 'major' foreign policy speech shows how clueless she is about Trump

Hillary Clinton has begun the policy wars with Donald Trump. She gave it her best shot Thursday with what was billed as a major foreign policy speech. I’ll save you the effort to read the transcript. She said in essence, nothing.
Most of her time was spent trash-talking Trump saying he’s neither smart enough nor stable enough to be president.
The rest of the time was telling us about all her many self-proclaimed successes and ending with how she and President Obama were responsible for killing Usama bin Laden. I give her full credit for that, as well as Obama. But that’s not the only issue in American foreign policy over the last two terms.
But let’s put aside her own very questionable judgment on a number of issues:
- Compromising national security with her cavalier treatment of our most classified information.
- Failing to protect or rescue Americans in Benghazi and then lying about it afterwards.
- Clamoring for the Libya war and supporting the premature Iraq withdrawal which enabled the spread of radical Islam far and wide.
- Failing to reset relations with Russia
The real problem is that Hillary Clinton represents the Democrat and Republican establishment position on national security issues. She claims it as a badge of honor. But frankly, the foreign policy establishment hasn’t gotten much right in the last fifteen years, whether it was the Bush or Obama administrations.
They lost three wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. And, if you count Syria, four.
They failed to stop the spread of radical Islam all around the world, and in some ways enabled it.
They encouraged the rise of Iran by signing a one-sided nuclear deal in a misguided attempt to get them to change. Sadly, it’s only emboldened Iran’s anti-American, pro-terrorist stance, as a determination to build nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.
The establishment decimated the U.S. military and abandoned our veterans. They’ve allowed America to be pushed around all over the world -- by China, by Iran, by Russia, and even the pipsqueak in North Korea.
They’ve also failed to get a handle on cyber-threats.
Secretary Clinton slams Trump for not appreciating, or even comprehending, the accepted conventional wisdom of both political parties. In so doing, she misses the point.
Trump hasn’t accepted the conventional wisdom because it hasn’t succeeded, at least not for the last decade or so.
Trump is forcing us to rethink our failed policies of the past, by relying on good, old-fashioned common sense.
You know who else did that? Reagan. In 1980 he challenged and beat the GOP establishment candidate George H.W. Bush in the primaries and went on to beat the incumbent Democrat President Jimmy Carter in the general election.
Reagan revisited the decades old policy of coexistence with the USSR and decided we should win the Cold War instead. We did within a decade, without firing a shot, by using our economic superiority.
Reagan rejected the mutually assured destruction (MAD) strategy of mutual suicide in favor of a Star Wars missile defense system that could protect us from nuclear attack.
So Hillary does have a point. Trump isn’t a conventional candidate. He doesn’t fall into line with conventional wisdom. He’s rethinking the issues. What will he come up with to replace the tired old theories of the past? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.
We’ll have to wait and see. That’s why we can throw out the rule book for this election.
And that’s why it’s so interesting.

Watchdog blasts bureaucrats for blocking ICE agents from San Bernardino terror suspect

A federal report released Thursday details a shocking turf battle that broke out when immigration officials blocked law enforcement agents from interviewing a person of interest in the San Bernardino terror attack last December.
Just one day after a radical Muslim couple opened fire on office workers at a Christmas party, the FBI asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain the man later determined to have supplied guns used in the attack.
When Homeland Security Investigations agents went to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office where Enrique Marquez and his wife were being interviewed, they were turned away, according to the report.
“Here, the agents were justifiably concerned that Marquez and Chernykh may pose a threat to the occupants and visitors of the USCIS facility,” the report by the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general states. “Less than 24 hours before, individuals associated with the couple had committed an atrocity on an unthinkable scale against unarmed innocents; at the time of HSI's visit to USCIS, Marquez and Chernykh’s intentions were unknown.
Homeland Security Investigations is part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which, like U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, is part of DHS.
The audit confirmed a March report by FoxNews.com and provided new details of the turf battle a day after Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik murdered 14 people in the Southern California community.
The Inspector General's Office conducted 23 interviews and a review of email, text, and phone records from the agencies, confirmed the stunning breakdown in cooperation that first caught the attention of Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., in March.
"Today's report confirms whistleblower complaints I received about a dangerous lack of coordination between ICE and the USCIS,” Johnson said Thursday. “The refusal to allow armed ICE agents into a USCIS facility to detain a suspected terrorist could have had tragic consequences.”
When five agents went to the USCIS building dressed in tactical gear to detain the couple, the report said they were confined to the lobby for up to 20 minutes, and then waited another 10 minutes to meet with the USCIS field office director. The agents told the field director they were looking for Marquez, “because he was connected to the shootings and there was concern that he could be in the building,” but the field office director told agents they could not “arrest, detain, or interview anyone in the building based on USCIS policy.”
The agents also were denied a file on Marquez’s wife as well as known addresses or any other information that could lead to their apprehension, according to the report. The HSI agents waited outside for an hour before being given clearance from Washington DC to return to the USCIS offices where they were allowed to hand copy the file.
The contract security personnel at the USCIS facility should have immediately permitted entry to the HSI agents once they identified themselves – the report said - adding USCIS had no authority to restrict their access.
“The USCIS Field Director’s behavior was not only outrageous and reprehensible, but in violation of federal law and policy that ensure any law enforcement agency the ability to make arrests or conduct interviews in government facilities,” said Jessica Vaughan serves as Director of Policy Studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, DC-based research institute. “These ICE agents are from the very same agency she works for – they are her homeland security colleagues.”
“A delay such as the one that occurred here could have disastrous consequences under different circumstances,” the report added.
Department of Homeland Security spokesman Neema Hakim said since this clash in December, changes have been made.
“ICE and USCIS have since improved their protocols for facility access and information sharing in circumstances with potential national security or public safety implications, in order to avoid any such delays in the future,” Department of Homeland Security spokesman Neema Hakim said in a statement to FoxNews.com.
USCIS agents were investigating Marquez for marriage fraud, stemming from his 2014 union with Chernykh, a Russian national married to Farook’s brother. Marquez, who is now in jail and awaiting trial this summer, is accused of supplying the guns as well as marriage fraud.
Both Farook and Malik were killed by law enforcement after their morning attack.
Marquez is already in jail and awaiting trial for conspiring with one of the San Bernardino attackers, Syed Rizwan Farook, in terror plots that never materialized.
Federal court documents obtained by FoxNews.com tied to Marquez’s case show both he and Farook abruptly halted plans for a dual terror attack in 2012. In that assault, Marquez and Farook allegedly planned to use pipe bombs and two AR-15 rifles “to maximize the number of casualties” at Riverside City College, a nearby institution they attended, and on state Route 91, a busy freeway with few exits where motorists are frequently stuck in heavy gridlock.
Marquez is also accused of supplying weapons to Farook and Malik before the Dec. 2 attack that also left 22 injured and is accused of making false statements in connection with his weapons purchases used in the San Bernardino shooting.
Marquez has pleaded not guilty to the charges filed against him. If convicted of all counts, Marquez faces up to 50 years in prison.

Obsession? Why media are feeding the public's hunger for Trump tales

It hit me while reading the collected letters of Donald J. Trump:
Is there any aspect of this guy’s life we won’t explore?
Or put another way: Is there any limit to the journalistic and public fascination with his life?
As a media critic, I regularly analyze whether news organizations are sufficiently vetting Trump, fact-checking Trump, being too hard or too soft on Trump. And these important questions are tied to the fact that the billionaire is a magnet for ratings and clicks.
But there’s something happening that stretches beyond the usual digging into a candidate’s fitness to be president, a process being conducted on steroids because, despite his fame, Trump is a newcomer to electoral politics.
There is a seemingly insatiable curiosity about his larger-than-life persona and what he is really like. This is true among those who think he would be a great president and those who think he would be a disaster as president. Whether it’s his celebrity, his wealth, his businesses, his kids, his escapades with women, a year’s worth of campaign scrutiny hasn’t diminished the appetite to know more about The Donald.

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Now Hillary Clinton has also led a colorful life. She’s been first lady, senator, secretary of State. She’s survived many brushes with scandal and her husband’s affairs. Bits of shorthand—cattle futures, pink press conference, vast right-wing conspiracy, Monica, email, Benghazi—conjure up controversial chapters of her life.
But Hillary has been a public figure for 25 years, the subject of countless articles and segments and books. She is also a more private person. So we already think we know what she’s about, or have concluded that we can’t get much deeper.
Yesterday’s New York Times story found a tender note that Trump once wrote to his wife Ivana: “I adore and love my little darling. I truly believe that you are the greatest.”
And there was this praise for a piece about Poland by the late Times editor Abe Rosenthal: “It is moving; it is sad; it is hopeful (?); it is devastating. It truly captured the strength, the will and the soul of the Polish people.”
In between were notes of gushing praise to Rudy Giuliani  (“the greatest mayor that the city’s ever had”) and a scrawled rebuke to a new critic, basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: “Now I know why the press always treated you so badly — they couldn’t stand you. The fact is that you don’t have a clue about life and what has to be done to make America great again!”
Looking back, we have waded through a veritable tsunami of pieces about Trump that transcend specific controversies over, say, the allegations against Trump University or his 3,500 lawsuits, according to USA Today. I can recall pieces on Trump’s golf game (and whether he cheats); his jet; his many estates (Forbes, complete with pictures); his wife Melania and a long-lost brother; his rating of women he would bed, with Howard Stern; his former butler, later found to have racist views; his relationship with Megyn Kelly; his beauty pageants, and whether he once posed as his own fictional spokesman.
Here’s some of what came up in a quick Google News search:
CBS: “Mark Cuban Questions Whether Donald Trump is a Billionaire”
New York Daily News: “‘I don't want to sound too much like a chauvinist,’ the 2016 presidential candidate said in a newly resurfaced 1994 ABC interview, before finishing his chauvinistic rant. ‘But when I come home and dinner's not ready, I go through the roof.’”
CNN on “Donald Trump’s Obsession with Himself”:
“The presumptive Republican presidential nominee is aiming to make the entire 2016 campaign about himself.”
And this from a BBC correspondent complaining about the media’s “cravenness”:
“For all the abuse, for all the belittlement, we as reporters show no sign of ending our relationship addiction with Donald Trump.”
Ah, the mental health explanation. But is it just journalists who are addicted, or all of America?
This intense curiosity about Trump World, fueled by the media, could ultimately persuade a majority of voters that he’s not presidential material. But if politics is increasingly becoming entertainment, I suspect many others want to find out what would happen if this reality-show star relocates to the White House.
Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.

San Jose protesters attack Trump supporters with punches, eggs

A group of protesters attacked Donald Trump supporters who were leaving the candidate's rally in San Jose on Thursday night. A dozen or more people were punched, at least one person was pelted with an egg and Trump hats grabbed from supporters were set on fire on the ground.
Police stood their ground at first but after about 90 minutes moved into the remaining crowd to break it up and make arrests. At least four people were taken into custody, though police didn't release total arrest figures Thursday night. One officer was assaulted, police Sgt. Enrique Garcia said.
There were no immediate reports of injuries and no major property damage, police said.
The crowd, which had numbered over 300 just after the rally, had thinned significantly but those that remained, filling about a city block near the San Jose Convention Center, were rowdy and angry.
Some banged on the cars of Trump supporters as they left the rally and chased after those on foot to frighten them.
Police were keeping their distance from the crowd as the scuffles played out, but keeping them from getting any closer to the convention center.

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"Our police officers have done an extremely courageous and professional job so far," San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo told The Associated Press by phone. "We're all still holding our breath to see the outcome of this dangerous and explosive situation."
The mayor, a Democrat and Hillary Clinton supporter, criticized Trump for coming to cities and igniting problems that local police departments had to deal with.
"At some point Donald Trump needs to take responsibility for the irresponsible behavior of his campaign," Liccardo said.
The presumptive GOP nominee spoke for about 50 minutes at the rally, sniping at Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and calling her speech on foreign policy earlier in the day "pathetic" and "sad to watch."
Protesters before the speech included Adam Rivas, a 22-year-old community college student who was born and raised in San Jose, was holding a spray-painted sign that read "Dump Trump."
Rivas said he was particularly disturbed by Trump's remarks about Mexicans.
"For any one Mexican here he bashes, there are about 20 Mexicans out there who are hard-working and just doing their job," he said.
Trump supporter Debbie Tracey, a U.S. Navy veteran from San Jose, she came to hear Trump speak, she left his rally with two hats a T-shirt and a handful of signs that said "Veterans for Trump."
Passing in front of a wall of protesters, many chanting in Spanish, she said she supported Trump's call for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
"I'll go help build the wall because if you are going to come to this country, land of opportunity, you should be here legally," she said.