TRump’s call for a wall at the southern border is questionable for many reasons, but one fact to consider is that sneaking across the southern border is the most suspicious and also the highest visibility way to enter the country for people we suspect as potential terrorists.
An individual with either false paperwork or a passport from one of tRump’s “travel ban” countries would probably choose any other way to enter the US over walking for days or weeks through some of the most highly patrolled open countryside in the world.
Their goal would be to blend in with other international travelers as just another foreign tourist in a busy place. Not traipse through a desert as an obvious interloper, where the odds of being stopped on sight and held indefinitely while multiple federal law enforcement agencies poked at you and your story are almost 100%.
Why would anyone with a covert plan start off by intentionally being somewhere that’s looking to catch people like them, knowing that if they were successful they then would have hundreds or thousands of miles of travel ahead of them through a country that is pretty attenuated to potential terrorists and a travel industry that screens for terrorists?
That’s why they come in through airports and at crossings at the Canadian border.
They probably have fake papers and cover stories, and are ready to use them with our authorities. But that doesn’t work if they are spotted in the middle of the desert, so why would they risk that?
Many, many people seek asylum at the southern border, or cross in search of better opportunities. I don’t believe it is as easy for others to “blend in” with those groups as tRump would like us to believe. I doubt the “coyotes” would risk helping international terrorists cross, either.
We need to focus our counter-terrorist people and security measures at the places where it makes sense for them to try to enter: where they don’t instantly stand out and where it makes sense for them to travel to.