AUSTIN, Texas – During the last three years of the Trump administration, the FBI’s dedicated China Initiative uncovered dozens of Chinese Communist spies who posed as academics and fired top American research institutions and their naive professors. was arrested. A delicate and valuable national defense research result.
These spies were flying into American airports very legally on cultural exchange and student visa programs, concealing their military service and diplomatic ties to China.
But after President Donald Trump’s crackdown on sending China a series of surprising cosmetics, his successor, President Biden, announced in July 2021 that Chinese international students should be subject to stricter and more frequent vetting. The Trump regulations, which could have been implemented immediately, were easily canceled out. and cultural exchange visa applicants.
That same month, the Justice Department dropped the charges against five visiting researchers who were spies as part of the new administration’s foreign policy.
Team Biden ended the spy-hunting program, particularly the China Initiative itself, in 2022 because its name contributed to prejudice against Chinese immigrants based in the United States.
Even if China’s spy agencies were not at all impressed by this generous offer, the Biden administration has now outdone itself.
His Department of Homeland Security has admitted at least 44,000 Chinese nationals who crossed the southwest border illegally since he took office through January 2024, most of them online for a few dollars. I first entered Ecuador by taking advantage of the cheap tourist visas available.
More Chinese than Mexicans cross the border in San Diego.
Although there is no evidence to support the theory that China is sending troops in civilian clothes to await Beijing’s orders to attack, it is almost certain that at least some of these young men and women are spies.
And based on China’s past relentless espionage efforts against the United States and the determination of our intelligence agencies, we have a good idea what they want to do this year.
There are the usual duties familiar from Trump-era prosecutors.
China is “likely to continue economic espionage” and “seek to illicitly acquire our technology and intellectual property,” the Department of Homeland Security’s own 2024 Homeland Threat Assessment concluded.
But this report adds a little-known layer.
Chinese operatives are using AI-driven social media campaigns to undermine November’s elections, sow political division, and undermine confidence in the country’s institutions and democracy , will be working hard online all year round.
In addition to stealing our technology and conducting influence campaigns beyond 2024, China will continue to target, locate, and “suppress” dissidents living and speaking out in the United States. They will hire operatives.
These agents will use “physical assault, intimidation, harassment and defamation, and intimidation,” including kidnapping abroad, “to suppress voices of dissent,” the threat assessment said.
China will be the most aggressive actor in this type of activity, the assessment declares, adding this surprising information without giving away many details: “Beijing A small number of secret, unauthorized “police stations” within the United States are used to identify, monitor and harass dissidents. Its global “fox-hunting operation” abducts Chinese dissidents and seeks their extradition under false legal names so that they can be dealt with.
What better way to staff these secret police stations and carry out their other duties than to move all the necessary agents across the wide open southern border into the United States? ?
There is no more dangerous method of entry.
China is sending them there, along with millions of other nationalities coming from all over the world, and Biden’s Border Patrol quickly admits almost all of them on their own recognizance. This is because Chinese government officials are well aware that they will later apply for asylum or asylum. They have been entrenched in American society for years with little questioning or scrutiny at the border to identify past service in China’s military or intelligence services.
For Chinese spies and government operatives, border crossings are less detectable than the student visa application process, which takes place at U.S. consulates and embassies in China and requires in-person interviews and searches of information databases. much less likely to occur.
In April, Biden DHS drastically reduced the number of questions asked during Border Patrol interviews. agent must ask The number of illegal Chinese immigrants has gone from 40 to just 5.
Why eliminate even this thin membrane of boundary examination?
News Video To avoid a massive back-up of humanity at the border that drones could capture and accelerate the flow into inland US cities.
There is no doubt that many of them are legitimate economic immigrants who want to live in America, the land of the free.
But China would be foolish not to deploy spies into this largely unregulated flow, and spymasters would not be foolish either.
They are patient and willing to invest in long-term outcomes over a period that certainly rivals a five-year backlog of asylum claims.
Many of the Chinese immigrants I’ve met on the trails in Mexico are the best equipped, best dressed, thoroughly coached on what to say, and most knowledgeable about trail travel.
Some are quite educated.
Their spies are certainly trained enough to break through five questions at the border.
And over time, they will definitely get into top universities, find jobs at top research institutions, join the US military under the guise of being anti-communist, and become federal civil servants. .
It may take a long time for U.S. counterintelligence agencies to discover those who have crossed the border.
By then, the damage will have been done by Team Biden’s extreme national security mismanagement.
Todd Bensman is a senior national security researcher at the Center for Immigration Studies.
