After 9/11, We Learned the Cost of a Security Gap

For most Americans, September 11 is remembered through images: burning towers, smoke over the Pentagon, flags, funerals, and a country suddenly at war.

For us, it was more than a date. It became the beginning of an adult lifetime spent involved, in one form or another, in the Global War on Terror (GWOT).

We learned what too many Americans have never had to see firsthand: the threat is real. The barbarism is real. Jihadist terrorists and their sympathizers exist, and they do not share America’s respect for innocent life, personal liberty, religious freedom, or the rule of law. They weaponize grievance, ideology, and faith to justify violence against people they have never met.

That is why September 11 cannot be reduced to another memorial ceremony or a social-media slogan.

It is a warning.

America was attacked because enemies found gaps: gaps in intelligence, travel screening, information sharing, security culture, and the assumption that someone else would catch the threat before it reached us.

The 9/11 hijackers exploited America’s immigration and travel system. They entered through legal visas and inspected ports of entry. The failure was not that America welcomed lawful visitors. The failure was that our government did not connect warning signs, verify identities, share intelligence, or stop hostile actors before they acted.

The 9/11 Commission found that the hijackers included known al-Qaeda operatives who could have been watchlisted, people using manipulated passports, people who made false statements on visa applications and to border officials, and people who violated immigration law while in the United States. The Commission’s answer was not indifference. It called for targeting terrorist travel, improving biometric screening across agencies, and completing an entry-exit screening system.

The lesson was simple then, and it remains simple today:

Immigration policy is not only a humanitarian policy. At its core, it is a national-security policy. The security of America and its citizens must come first.

The Cost of Weakness

Democratic leaders spent years defending policies that weakened deterrence, expanded release-based processing, resisted detention and removal, restricted ICE cooperation, opposed enforcement-centered border legislation, and protected sanctuary jurisdictions.

Their intentions may have been packaged in the language of compassion, inclusion, asylum, and due process.

Criminal organizations do not care about intentions.

They care about opportunity.

The Biden-era numbers make that opportunity impossible to ignore. DHS recorded 1.72 million southwest-border enforcement encounters in FY2021, a historic total at the time. The following years remained at extraordinary levels.

No serious person believes every person crossing illegally is a terrorist, a trafficker, a cartel operative, or a foreign agent. Most are not.

But national security does not get to assume the dangerous few are harmless.

When a country loses control of the volume moving through its border and immigration system, it loses confidence in its ability to distinguish the peaceful individual from the violent one, the worker from the trafficker, the asylum claim from the fraudulent claim, or the traveler from the hostile actor using a false identity.

That is not compassion.

That is negligence disguised as compassion.

The Networks Are Real

Cartels do not move only narcotics. They operate cross-border logistics enterprises built on human smuggling, extortion, money laundering, weapons movement, document fraud, drug trafficking, and exploitation.

The Sinaloa Cartel and Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación see human beings as another revenue stream. Their goal is not to help anyone build a better life. Their goal is to make money off the movement, indebtedness, vulnerability, and exploitation of people.

Those networks do not need a unified command structure with terrorists, foreign governments, Chinese criminal brokers, traffickers, and smugglers. They need overlapping routes, money, false documents, corrupt facilitators, transportation, and an enforcement system too overwhelmed—or too politically constrained—to close the gap.

And the bad actors are not theoretical.

ICE reported that it removed 139 known or suspected terrorists in FY2023 and 55 in FY2022. Its reports also identify thousands of known or suspected gang members and foreign fugitives removed from the country.

The proper conclusion is not collective blame against immigrants.

It is prevention.

America has the right and obligation to know who is entering, who is here, who has violated the terms of entry, who is using false identity documents, and who poses a public-safety or national-security threat.

Sanctuary Is Not Security

Sanctuary policies are not neutral.

They exist to restrict cooperation between local governments and federal immigration enforcement. They limit information sharing, detention support, custody cooperation, and other mechanisms federal agencies use to identify, detain, and remove people who are unlawfully present.

A city can decide that local police should not serve as routine immigration agents.

But no city should create a wall that obstructs lawful action against a cartel facilitator, trafficker, violent offender, identity-fraud suspect, foreign operative, or person tied to a credible terrorism lead.

Sanctuary must never mean sanctuary from a legitimate national-security investigation.

Democratic leaders who oppose enforcement capacity, protect sanctuary restrictions, resist detention, and dismiss border-control concerns as politics are choosing a posture that organized crime can exploit.

They are not protecting New Mexico.

They are protecting the gaps.

Prevention Is the Job

We are not predicting another September 11.

We are saying something more basic: America has already paid in blood for ignoring security failures.

Those of us who spent years in the national-security world know that adversaries study weaknesses. Cartels see profit. Traffickers see inventory. Foreign criminal networks see money. Jihadist terrorists see access.

Loose security will be exploited.

The answer is not hatred. It is not collective blame. It is lawful enforcement, vigilance, and prevention.

Control the border. Verify identity. Screen entrants. Track visa overstays. Detain people when law and risk justify detention. Remove people ordered removed. Dismantle cartel logistics. Fund Border Patrol, CBP, ICE, HSI, DEA, FBI, and joint task forces. Ensure local governments cannot obstruct lawful action in terrorism, trafficking, cartel, violent-crime, weapons, or identity-fraud cases.

Too many American lives have already been lost to terrorism at home and abroad: civilians, first responders, soldiers, airmen, Marines, sailors, families, and allies caught in violence inflicted by people who reject America’s freedoms and the value we place on innocent human life.

The simplest lesson leaders should be able to agree on—in the name of every American lost—is this:

America’s immigration system and border protection must be maximized, lawfully enforced, and treated as a core national-security mission. The purpose is prevention: to mitigate future attacks on our people, our land, and our way of life.

September 11 should remain in America’s DNA—not as fear, but as vigilance.

Because government’s first responsibility is not to explain why it failed after Americans die.

It is to prevent the failure in the first place.