On Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Laura Coates Live,” Georgetown University faculty member and former Chief of Homeland Security and Intelligence for the Government of the District of Columbia Dr. Donell Harvin said that “President Trump is actually right…during the Biden era, there were about 1,600 Iranian nationals that presented themselves to the border, what we don’t know is how many of those people were sent here, if those people are just regular people who aren’t trying to commit crimes. But we also don’t know the getaways.” He also stated that the majority of the terror threat we’ve seen comes from people who are inspired by Iran, but don’t have any connections to it.
Host Laura Coates played video of Trump responding to a question on Iranian sleeper cells by saying, “[A] lot of people came in through Biden with his stupid open border. But we know where most of them are and we’ve got our eye on all of them, I think.”
Harvin responded, “So, this is a bigger discussion than we actually have time for. So, you have the traditional sleeper cells, people who came over as part of the diaspora from the fall of the Shah, that they’ve been monitoring for decades. Now, these people are in their 60s or 70s and probably not a threat. That’s the traditional intelligence. Then you have people who may — they may have influenced or inspired. Then you have — President Trump is actually right — he’s [got] a little hyperbole there — but during the Biden era, there were about 1,600 Iranian nationals that presented themselves to the border, what we don’t know is how many of those people were sent here, if those people are just regular people who aren’t trying to commit crimes. But we also don’t know the getaways.”
Harvin continued, “The problem is, I think most of what we’ve seen now, and I think this will bear out, are people who have no connection with the actual country, who may be inspired, like ISIS inspires people. We [saw] that just a couple of days ago, with the bombing in front of Gracie Mansion in New York, we saw that in October, with the ISIS-inspired youth that were trying to commit the Halloween attack. And so, people can be inspired and have no relationship or no connection to it. So, there [are] a lot of threat streams we have to keep an eye on. Law enforcement, Homeland Security, does have an idea of people that may be aligned with Iranian forces or may have been compromised by them. There [are] a lot of people out there that they have to keep an eye on.”
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