Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) blasted President Biden for his lax approach to the southern border of the United States, warning that it left the nation vulnerable to an attack from a resurgent ISIS.
“History tends to repeat itself, especially as it relates to President Joe Biden. His ideologically rigid open-border policies have laid us wide open to the growing threat of terror abroad,” Waltz stated in an opinion piece for Fox News.
Noting Biden’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan in 2021, Waltz opined, “[R]adical jihadists love a power vacuum, and what followed is a similar pattern to what we’re seeing unfold in Afghanistan. Our country finds itself with an almost identical threat we faced from ISIS in 2014.”
“Within three years, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) filled the power vacuum left behind by the U.S. and established a caliphate the size of Indiana to terrorize the region and inspire attacks across Europe and the U.S.,” he recalled.
Waltz noted the 2015 attack by Islamists in San Bernardino, California in which 14 people were murdered, and the fact that ISIS hailed the attack; the murderer who pledged allegiance to ISIS when he killed 49 people at the Pulse Nightclub attack in Orlando, Florida six months later, and a “wave of Islamic terrorist attacks across Europe.”
Then he turned to current events: “In March, German officials arrested two Afghans linked to ISIS-K for plotting an attack against Sweden’s parliament. In December, Austrian officials arrested three terrorists with ties to ISIS-K for plotting attacks on Christian sites during Christmas Eve.”
“What happens in Afghanistan doesn’t stay in Afghanistan,” he declared. “This is a lesson that should have stayed with us after the September 11 attacks. … We cannot trust the Taliban to keep a lid on the rise of ISIS-K in Afghanistan. Just last year, terrorists took the lives of over 1,500 in neighboring Pakistan through various attacks and the region continues to grow more unstable. CENTCOM Commander General Michael Kurilla recently warned lawmakers ISIS could carry out an attack on the U.S. or Europe within six months with ‘little to no warning.’”
“The Biden administration’s refusal to take our border security seriously is making us increasingly vulnerable to a terrorist attack and there is little we can do to stem exporting of terror out of Afghanistan. … Biden has left us with little options and has America on defense. Above all, in the short term, the border must be secured by reinstating Trump-era policies like Title 42,” he wrote.
“Biden’s continual refusal to acknowledge the mistakes he made has only emboldened global terrorism – and thanks to his open-borders ideology, we are now even less safe at home,” he concluded.