Iran ‘sleeper cell’ threat proves we MUST secure our borders

The Iran crisis of the past two weeks isn’t just about nuclear weapons — it’s also an urgent reminder that border security is national security.

President Donald Trump has thwarted Iran’s nuclear ambitions and swiftly settled a cease-fire.

Yet the war showed how destructive ballistic missiles can be even when they don’t bear atomic payloads.

And while the mullahs’ missiles can’t reach the United States, another Iranian weapons program must be neutralized if we’re to be safe at home: Tehran’s terrorist agents.

They’ve been a threat to Salman Rushdie’s life here and in Europe for more than 35 years — and in 2022 an attacker sympathetic to the Iranian government cost the author of “The Satanic Verses” one of his eyes and very nearly his life.

Trump himself has been the target of other Iranian plots.

According to court documents, Asif Merchant, a Pakistani man arrested in Texas last year, “indicated an affinity for Iran” when he attempted to hire hitmen to help murder a “political person” believed to be Trump — a scheme thwarted because the associates he sought to recruit were in fact FBI agents.

A second plot involved Farhad Shakeri, an Afghan national now on the lam in Iran.

In November, federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged Shakeri with providing material support for a foreign terrorist organization and planning to kill Trump on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Shakeri and two associates also stand accused of concocting a plan to murder “a US citizen of Iranian origin who has publicly opposed the Iranian government,” according to Politico.

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After American forces bombed three Iranian nuclear-program sites on Saturday, NBC News reported Iran had earlier warned Trump it could activate “sleeper cells” within the United States to retaliate against an attack on its facilities.

Rodney Scott, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, alerted CBP agents to the danger the country now faces because of the porous border policies of the Joe Biden administration.

“Over the past four years, thousands of Iranian [nationals] have been documented entering the United States illegally and countless more were likely in the known and unknown got-a-ways,” Scott wrote in an agency memo.

More than 1,500 Iranians were apprehended illegally entering via the southern border during the Biden years, Fox News reported — and more than 700 of them were released into our country after their arrest.

America has bitter experience with terrorism made possible by weak immigration enforcement.

Five of the 19 hijackers who pulled off the worst terrorist attack in our history on 9/11 were in the country on expired visas.

Yet the legal immigration status of the other 14 is at least as much of a scandal — was there really nothing that could have been done to screen out these terrorists?

Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration and tightening of border controls and admissions guidelines for foreign students and other legal visitors have outraged liberals, but detecting signs of radicalism before a Revolutionary Guard or al Qaeda sympathizer has the opportunity to strike is what’s necessary to prevent another 9/11.

Iran has for decades used Hezbollah and other terrorist proxies to menace Israel and other regional neighbors, as well as to kill Americans in Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere.

Liberals in our country think of “globalization” as a benign economic process involving the free movement of capital, people and ideas across borders.

But what happens when the people are terrorists, the capital finances their attacks and the ideas are antisemitic and anti-American?

Globalization extends the battlefields of regional wars to our own land and airspace.

The voters who returned Trump to the White House think globalization has been a raw deal for their livelihoods and a solvent to their communities.

But globalization has also changed the nature of war, heightening the need for vigilance at our borders.

Firmer control over who comes into our country is what’s required to deprive Iran of its long-range terror weapon.

Israel was able to launch its preventive war against Iran’s nuclear program because it had successfully degraded and largely defanged Hezbollah.

There would be no two-front war for Israel — one over Iran, the other at home.

America is blessed to have two oceans separating us from the conflicts of the Old World, and no neighbors who hate us for our religion or way of life.

The security we enjoy on our continent, and throughout the Americas, has been the envy of other great powers for two and a half centuries.

But the tranquility our geography and history afford us has to be defended against the dark side of globalization, including the transcontinental terrorism it makes possible.

Winning the wars of the future calls for stopping them from ever getting started within our borders.

Trump’s success in that regard made possible his success this week in the Middle East.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative.