The United States is highly vulnerable to a terrorist attack because of America’s “lax immigration policies,” according to the head of a government union composed of nearly 12,000 immigration officials.
Kenneth Palinkas, president of the National Citizenship and Immigration Services Council, announced Thursday that there is an “extremely real and serious threat that ISIS has already or will soon slip across our porous southern border.”
“[I]t is also essential to warn the public about the threat that ISIS will exploit our loose and lax visa policies to gain entry to the United States,” Palinkas said in a statement obtained by The Daily Caller.
“Indeed, as we know from the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, from the Boston Bombing, from the recent plot to bomb a school and courthouse in Connecticut, and many other lesser-known terror incidents,” he wrote, “we are letting terrorists into the United States right through our front door.”
Palinkas also directly criticized the Obama administration, which has “widened the loopholes that terrorists could use to gain entry to the United States through our asylum system.”
“The Administration has also blocked our partners in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from enforcing visa overstays,” he continued. “The 9/11 hijackers got into the U.S. on visas and now, 13 years later, we have around 5 million immigrants in the United States who overstayed their visas – many from high-risk regions in the Middle East.”
The immigration unions have been fierce opponents to President Obama’s version of comprehensive immigration reform.
Palinkas attacked the president’s immigration agenda, referring to it as nothing more than an “amnesty” that “would legalize visa overstays and cause millions additionally to overstay – raising the threat level to America even higher.”
“Those who defraud authorities will face no consequence at all in most cases,” Palinkas wrote. “Our caseworkers cannot even do in-person interviews for people seeking citizenship, they cannot enforce restrictions on welfare use, and they even lack even the basic office space to properly function. Applications for entry are rubber-stamped, the result of grading agents by speed rather than discretion.”
“We’ve become the visa clearinghouse for the world.”