Day: August 11, 2023

Heightened Risks at Border And Interior

By Joe Guzzardi

The calamitous consequences of President Biden’s open borders and his hastily concocted Operation Allies Welcome (OAW) for Afghan resettlement are increasingly visible and will likely become graver as time passes. Stories about drugs, human trafficking and migrant border deaths have been told and retold so many times that, sad to say, they’ve lost their shock effect.

This week two reports, one from the border, and the other from the heartland, should jolt Americans back into reality. Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) drone operators in Eagle Pass spotted an armed smuggler carrying a long gun, wearing body armor and guiding a group of illegal immigrants across the Rio Grande. Photographs of the suspected cartel members have been posted online. In a similar incident in June, five suspected members of the Cartel del Noreste were arrested in the same area after illegally crossing the border armed with rifles and tactical gear.

There’s nothing from the White House except, in anticipation of another surge, the Department of Homeland Security calling for more volunteers from within the agency to sign up with Customs and Border Protection to help process migrants – translation: to assist in releasing aliens into the general population. Cartels and transnational criminal organizations have reaped billions of dollars in profits. Hands down, they are the biggest winners under bad Biden policies, implemented by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.

From the interior, heartbreaking news came from St. Louis, a city that encouraged and welcomed refugee resettlement. In 2021, St. Louis became home to a record number of refugees and asylum seekers, including more than 500 people from Afghanistan. One of the Afghan OAW refugees may have been Osmani Haji Gul, the 34-year-old accused of sexually assaulting a six-year-old on July 23. Gul is currently in protective custody in St. Louis’ City Justice Center, being detained under a “Hold SK ICE” status which means he is not a permanent resident or a U.S. citizen. Investigators tied Gul to another sex crime against a 12-year-old on July 16.

The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department said Gul, seen in neighborhood surveillance footage, grabbed the 6-year-old while the child was riding a bike and took him to a vacant residence in the St. Louis Hills neighborhood on July 23. Then, police said, Gul sodomized the child. Charges against Gul include first-degree statutory sodomy and sexual misconduct involving a child, as well as charges of first-degree attempted statutory sodomy and fourth-degree assault.

Gul’s immigration background has been withheld from the public – the standard operating procedure when crimes that will cast a bad light on the nation’s welcome-the-world policy unfold. Despite repeated efforts, the reporting team at St. Louis News 4 Investigates has been unsuccessful in learning more about Gul’s background, including the vital facts about when and how he arrived in the U.S. Perhaps Gul was one of the 132,000 Afghans residing in the U.S. before OAW, or perhaps he was part of that misguided mission.

Javad Khazaeli, Gul’s lawyer, a former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement prosecutor, said that the federal government and the police know the child predator’s history, but will not release it. The lawyer then reverted to the often-told lie that refugees undergo a vigorous vetting process.

On February 15, the Department of Defense Inspector General’s Office (IG) laid out the truth when issuing its “Evaluation of the Screening of Displaced Persons from Afghanistan.” The IG’s detailed account was a damning assessment of the Biden administration’s failures to screen, vet and transport tens of thousands of Afghan nationals to the U.S. following the botched U.S. withdrawal from that country. Eventually, reports surfaced that “none of the 82,000 individuals flown from Afghanistan to the United States were properly vetted.”

Gul’s story is unfolding, and the specifics may or may not eventually become public. But more of the same unashamed disregard for public safety is guaranteed as long as Biden and Mayorkas keep their jobs, a virtual certainty given the GOP’s failure to put up meaningful resistance to the immigration status quo.

Joe Guzzardi is a Project for Immigration Reform analyst. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org.

Heightened Risks at Border And Interior