Canada’s visa and planned Oct. 7 terror attack focuses attention on northern border

by WorldTribune Staff, October 2, 2024 Contract With Our Readers

Some 400 individuals on the FBI terrorism watch list have been apprehended attempting to cross the U.S. southern border during the Biden-Harris administration, according to Border Patrol.

Muhammad Shahzeb Khan / Quebec Superior Court

The case of a Pakistani who planned to carry out a mass shooting of Jews in New York City on Oct. 7, the anniversary of the Hamas slaughter of some 1,200 Israelis, has focused attention on the U.S. northern border and leftist Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s immigration policies.

Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, a 20-year-old Pakistani citizen, was legally issued a Canadian student visa in June 2023. He now stands accused in U.S. federal court of plotting an illegal-smuggler-assisted northern border crossing to gun down Jews in New York City on Oct. 7, Todd Bensman reported for the Center for Immigration Studies on Oct. 1.

Khan said he hoped to go down in history as carrying out “the largest U.S. attack since 9/11”.

“We are going to nyc (sic) to slaughter them” with AR-style rifles and hunting knives “so we can slit their throats,” Khan told an undercover FBI agent he believed to be a co-conspirator, according to an agent complaint. “Even if we don’t attack an event, we could rack up easily a lot of Jews.”

In a joint undercover sting operation with the FBI, Canadian authorities on Sept. 4 arrested Khan just 12 miles from the U.S. border. Khan was “on his way by car to meet the (real) smuggler with a pocketful of cash for payment and a plan to attack Jewish ‘Chabad’ centers in Brooklyn,” Bensman noted.

An extradition proceeding is planned to bring Khan from detention in Quebec to stand trial in New York on a U.S. terrorism indictment.

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After 9/11, it was unheard of for a terror suspect to be caught attempting to cross the U.S. northern border.

“Starkly unlike Mexico, illegal land entry approaches from the rest of the world into Canada simply do not exist, and so foreign jihadists wishing to get into Canada for a U.S. border crossing would have to do so by defrauding legal visa systems, defeating their much-improved new counterterrorism vetting systems to enter by commercial air or maybe by ship,” Bensman wrote.

That changed in recent years, however, as Trudeau’s progressive regime in 2021 “embarked on a purposeful program to import a new foreign national workforce in the hundreds of thousands per year from all over the world. This clearly strained our northern neighbor’s post-9/11 ability to thoroughly vet those entering for terrorism ties or predilection for violent extremism,” Bensman wrote.

Khan was part of Canada’s record-breaking issuance of 400,000 foreign student visas in 2023.

“Rarely, if ever, have either the Biden-Harris administration or U.S. media outlets linked the rise in illegal border-crossing entries from Canada to the Trudeau government’s hugely increased legal immigration program. But that grace period has gone on too long and must end,” Bensman wrote. “The Biden-Harris government is not on record publicly complaining about the rise in illegal crossings resulting from the Trudeau program, let alone the national security implications of the new-ish phenomenon.”

Bensman added: “Khan’s fortuitous arrest — and other recent terror events in Canada involving the new arrivals — should serve as a wake-up call that Prime Minister Trudeau’s mass legal immigration program endangers Americans to an extent that has not been seen in the post-9/11 era and must be vigorously addressed.”


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