The Gaza Strip is 7,600 miles from San Diego and surrounded by Israeli tanks and a U.S. carrier strike group, but local Republican lawmakers and candidates are calling to shut the border to asylum seekers over fears of Hamas terrorism.
Supervisor Jim Desmond, El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells, Supervisor candidate Amy Reichert and Congressional candidate Margarita Wilkinson held a press conference outside the County Operations Center Friday to call for tightening border controls.
Desmond said the Border Patrol has been overwhelmed, with over 24,000 migrants dropped on to the streets of San Diego County in the past six weeks, creating a threat of terrorist infiltration.
“Given these stats and the national security issues that are going on out there with the war in the Middle East and with terrorists who want to kill people in the Middle East but also in the United States, we do not want to have open and porous borders,” he said.
Wells warned that “we see more people coming from the Middle East, from parts of Africa, all over Asia, coming to America, many of them military-age males who we don’t know anything about.”
The calls for closing the border to migrants came after news reports citing a possible threat of Hamas infiltration, but U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it “has seen no indication of Hamas-directed foreign fighters seeking to make entry into the United States.”
The four stressed that anyone with proper documentation should continue to be allowed to cross into the United States from Mexico.
The ports of Otay Mesa and San Ysidro handle approximately 100,000 crossings every weekday.
