Immigration

Feds Issue Terror Watch for the Texas/Mexico Border

By Jana Winter

Published May 26, 2010

| FOXNews.com

The Department of Homeland Security is alerting Texas authorities to be on the lookout for a suspected member of the Somalia-based Al Shabaab terrorist group who might be attempting to travel to the U.S.
through Mexico, a security expert who has seen the memo tells
FOXNews.com.

The warning follows an indictment unsealed this month in Texas federal court that accuses a Somali man in Texas of running a “large-scale smuggling enterprise” responsible for bringing hundreds of
Somalis from Brazil through South America and eventually across the
Mexican border. Many of the illegal immigrants, who court records say
were given fake IDs, are alleged to have ties to other now-defunct
Somalian terror organizations that have merged with active organizations
like Al Shabaab, al-Barakat and Al-Ittihad Al-Islami.

In 2008, the U.S. government designated Al Shabaab a terrorist organization. Al Shabaab has said its priority is to impose Sharia, or Islamic law, on Somalia; the group has aligned itself with Al Qaeda and
has made statements about its intent to harm the United States.

In recent years, American Somalis have been recruited by Al Shabaab to travel to Somalia, where they are often radicalized by more extremist or operational anti-American terror groups, which Al Shabaab supports.
The recruiters coming through the Mexican border are the ones who could
be the most dangerous, according to law enforcement officials.

Security experts tell FOXNews.com that the influx of hundreds of Somalis over the U.S. border who allegedly have ties to suspected terror cells is evidence of a porous and unsecured border being exploited by
groups intent on wrecking deadly havoc on American soil.

The DHS alert was issued to police and sheriff’s deputies in Houston, asking them to keep their eyes open for a Somali man named Mohamed Ali who is believed to be in Mexico preparing to make the illegal crossing
into Texas. Officials believe Ali has ties to Al Shabaab, a Somali
terrorist organization aligned with Al Qaeda, said Joan Neuhaus Schaan,
the homeland security and terrorism fellow at Rice University’s Baker
Institute, who has seen the alert.

An indictment was unsealed in Texas federal court earlier this month that revealed that a Somali man, Ahmed Muhammed Dhakane, led a human smuggling ring that brought East Africans, including Somalis with ties
to terror groups, from Brazil and across the Mexican border and into
Texas.

In a separate case, Anthony Joseph Tracy, of Virginia, who admitted to having ties to Al Shabaab, is currently being prosecuted for his alleged role in an international ring that illegally brought more than
200 Somalis across the Mexican border. Prosecutors say Tracy used his
Kenya-based travel business as a cover to fraudulently obtain Cuban
travel documents for the Somalis. The smuggled Somalis are believed to
have spread out across the United States and remain mostly at large,
court records show.

Somalis are classified by border and immigration officials as “special interest” — illegal immigrants who get caught trying to cross the Mexican border into the U.S. who come from countries that are
considered a high threat to the U.S., Neuhaus Schaan explained.

DHS did not respond to multiple e-mail and phone requests for comment.

In addition to the Somali immigration issue, Mexican smugglers are coaching some Middle Eastern immigrants before they cross the border – schooling them on how to dress and giving them phrases to help them look
and sound like Latinos, law enforcement sources told FoxNews.com.

“There have been a number of certain communities that have noticed this, villages in northern Mexico where Middle Easterners try to move into town and learn Spanish,” Neuhaus Schaan said. “People were changing
there names from Middle Eastern names to Hispanic names.”
Security experts say the push by illegal immigrants to try to fit in
also could be the realization of what officials have feared for years:
Latin American drug cartels are helping jihadist groups bring terrorists
across the Mexican border.

J. Peter Pham, senior fellow and director of the Africa Project at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, said that for the past ten years there’s been suspicion by U.S. law enforcement that drug
cartels could align with international terrorist organizations to bring
would-be-jihadists into the U.S.

That kind of collaboration is already being seen in Africa, said Dr. Walid Phares, director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

“Al Qaeda could easily say, “Ok, now we want your help getting these guys into the United States,” Phares said. “Eventually the federal government will pay more attention, but there is a window of time now
where they can get anyone they want to get in already.”

Experts also say the DHS alert and recent court case highlights the threat of terrorists penetrating the Mexican/Texas border — and the growing threat of Somali recruitment efforts to bring Americans of
Somali descent back to Somalia for jihadist training, creating homegrown
terrorists.
Pham says the DHS alert comes too late. “They’re just covering
themselves for the fact that DHS has been failing to date to deal
effectively with this,” he said. “They’re already here.”

Michael Weinstein, a political science professor at Purdue University and an expert on Somalia, said, “In the past year, it’s become obvious that there’s a spillover into the United States of the transnational
revolutionaries in Somalia.”

“It’s something that certainly has to be watched, but I don’t think it’s an imminent threat,” he said. “This has to be put in context with people smuggling — everybody and their brother is getting into the
United States through Mexico; I read last week that some Chinese were
crossing, it’s just a big market.”

Pham disagrees. “The real danger is ‘something along the lines of jihadist version of ‘find a classmate,’ he said, referring to Al Shabaab’s potential to set up sleeper cells in the U.S. “Most of them
rely on personal referral and association. That type of social
networking is not beyond their capabilities.”

Pham says the DHS alert is too little, too late.

“This is like shutting the barn door after the horses got away,” he said..