“The risk is as threatening today as it was that September morning almost 16 years ago,” Mr. Kelly, a retired four-star Marine Corps general, said in a speech last week at George Washington University. Mr. Kelly suggested that undocumented immigrants may not be the only threat coming across the border with Mexico, pointing to the possibility of terrorists using the same smuggling routes to infiltrate the United States.
“We have tremendous threats, whether it’s drugs, people, potential terrorists coming up from the south,” Mr. Kelly told CBS’s “Face the Nation” last Sunday.
The secretary’s comments raise several questions about the threat of terrorists sneaking across the border with the aid of cartels, the connection between drug smuggling and the recent surge in overdoses, and marijuana as a “gateway drug.”
Here’s what the experts say:
