Terrorists Buying Latin American Passports to Enter the US?

This is not the first time this has been reported. But there are many new details in this report from the Center for Security Policy:

Last week, the San Antonio Express-News posted a story about three Afghani Muslim men caught carrying stolen Mexican passports with their pictures and data while en route to Europe. It was revealed by authorities that the documents were genuine and that these men had purchased them for $10,000 each.

With this in mind, there is a real possibility that any of these individuals having access to stolen, doctored passports, and thus to U.S. visas could enter this country with the purpose of carrying out terrorist attacks. In fact, it has already happened: four of the nineteen hijackers from 9/11 carried passports that had been "manipulated in a fraudulent manner." The Saudi documentation was genuine, and so were the U.S. visas. Investigators believe the hijackers obtained new passports after telling Saudi authorities they had "lost" their old ones, presumably to cover up trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Then, knowing that brand new passports would raise questions, the hijackers artificially aged them and forged entry and exit stamps. When asked, a veteran counterterrorism expert said that “without a microscopic forensic examination, a routine inspector wouldn’t have ascertained that the stamps weren’t valid.”

It now seems that any person wanting to attack this country could use doctored or manipulated passports or could simply travel to Mexico and pay a Coyote to illegally cross the border.

For some time now, experts agree that South America has become a place of preference for terrorists that want to travel to the United States. A case in point is that in 2005, Mr. Minas Mirza of Warren, Michigan along with three others were charged with smuggling people into the U.S. through South America ever since 2001. In guilty pleas, they admitted helping dozens of Iraqis and Jordanians travel to the United States on European passports. In fact, these travel documents had been stolen and then doctored in Lima, Peru and purchased by Mirza there from a “broker.”