Chickens Coming Home to Roost: Biden’s Open Border Policy Meets Iranian Terror Threat

The warnings about the “open border” were dismissed by the previous administration as political theater. But today, as the United States navigates a direct and volatile conflict with Iran, those warnings have morphed into a chilling reality: there is mounting evidence that the very policies that saw the issue primarily in terms of the “orderly processing” of large numbers of border crossers and not national security may have allowed the American heartland to be seeded with Iranian sleeper cells.

For four years, the Biden Administration treated the southern border essentially as a humanitarian logistics challenge rather than what it actually is: the frontline of American national security. By dismantling enforcement mechanisms and allowing millions of unvetted individuals to cross into the United States, the Biden White House created the most porous national boundary in modern history.

While much of the political debate focused on the economic strain on cities and the influx of fentanyl, counterterrorism experts were quietly sounding the alarm about a much darker threat. There was an astronomical rise in encounters with individuals on the terror watch list, which, combined with millions of undocumented “gotaways” who vanished into the interior, created a catastrophic blind spot. It provided a virtually unobstructed pipeline for foreign adversaries to infiltrate the homeland.

Nor is the fear that Iran utilized this chaotic open-border period to embed itself within the United States a right-wing conspiracy theory: it is a highly credible, evidence-based intelligence nightmare.

It is a well-documented fact that thousands of Iranian nationals entered the United States illegally during the Biden years. We witnessed an unprecedented influx of “Special Interest Aliens” – individuals from nations that pose significant security and counterintelligence risks. And the data now show that many thousands of Iranian nationals entered the United States illegally with many of them released into the interior, largely unvetted.

In addition, the strategic logic of this approach for Iran is entirely straightforward. Iran knows it cannot defeat the United States military in a conventional, symmetrical conflict – a reality currently being demonstrated by Operation Epic Fury.

Therefore, their doctrine would perforce rely heavily on asymmetric warfare: terrorism, assassination plots, and the sabotage of critical infrastructure. By pre-positioning sleeper cells inside the United States, Iran gains the ultimate leverage. It can, virtually at will, attempt to target American power grids, transportation hubs, or Jewish communities and force the U.S. government to focus inward.

We are now paying the price for treating border security as a partisan wedge issue rather than a fundamental pillar of national defense. The Trump Administration is working aggressively to seal the border and deport criminal threats, but the damage from the Biden Administration is already inside the house.

The individuals who slipped through the cracks during the era of unprecedented negligence did not come here to seek asylum. They came here to wait for an order. As we project strength abroad to finally end the Iranian threat, we must drastically escalate our domestic counterterrorism efforts to root out the sleeper cells that the Biden Administration’s open-door policies allowed to walk right in.