Author: Alan Gomez / Source: USA TODAY
President Trump plans to make a prime time address about the “Humanitarian and National Security crisis on our Southern Border.” Veuer’s Sam Berman has the full story. Buzz60
In the days leading up to President Donald Trump’s televised address to the nation on Tuesday night to promote his southern border wall, administration officials have justified the proposal by claiming that thousands of terrorists are pouring across that border.
But data and analysis from his own administration have drastically undercut that message, calling into question whether the situation along the U.S.-Mexico border is truly a “national emergency” as Trump has increasingly claimed.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said on Friday that Customs and Border Protection officials caught nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists “that came across our southern border.” She repeated that claim on talk shows throughout the weekend, and Vice President Mike Pence used the same data point during an appearance on “Good Morning America” on Tuesday.
But in the State Department’s summary of global terrorism threats published in September, analysts concluded that there was “no credible evidence indicating that international terrorist groups…sent operatives via Mexico into the United States.”
On Monday, NBC News reported that the number of known or suspected terrorists actually caught along the southern border by CBP in the first half of 2018 was about 1 percent of the Trump administration’s claim. According to CBP data provided to Congress, the agency encountered 41 people on the Terrorist Screening Database from Oct….
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