This thirteen-year work of journalism finally settles one of the nation’s most controversial and politically powerful ideas about the American southern border: that Islamic jihadists might infiltrate it and commit terrorist acts. Perhaps no other idea about the border has sown more conflict, claims, counterclaims, rebuttals, and false narratives on all sides.
This book provides a first comprehensive neutral baseline of truth about the threat, goring oxen on both sides of the partisan divide. It documents an ambitious and intrigue-laden covert American war on terror effort that stretches from the Mexican border to the tip of South America. Its existence to protect the homeland from terrorist infiltration was often regarded as entirely imagined—until migrating jihadists recently started killing and wounding hundreds in Europe.
Americans concerned by unchecked global migration, porous borders, and national security also may feel surprised to learn that thousands of long-haul migrants from the Islamic world similarly breach the US-Mexican border each year—among them hardened jihadists—despite media insistence that none of this traffic exists.
It does. The secret American campaign has prevented land border infiltration attack on US soil, safeguarding an unknowing nation—so far—from Europe’s bloody ongoing experience. But this geographically sprawling effort is suffering from denialism and neglect at America’s peril…just as Europe was before its calamity. How much longer can these programs keep America safe without the public recognition that they exist and the needed care and attention that acknowledgment would bring? This book is much more than revelation and complaint; it provides solutions to better protect the homeland from this chronically misunderstood border threat.
