Iran Press/Iran news: US President Donald Trump revived an old and still unproved rumor which hints that Islamic migrants were entering the United States through Mexico and could pose a terrorism threat.
Starting as early as 2005, politicians have claimed to have discovered discarded prayer rugs — and perhaps even the Holy Quran or “a lot of stuff written in Arabic” — at the southern border, hinting without evidence that Islamic migrants were entering the United States through Mexico and could pose a terrorism threat, The New York Times reported.
Trump’s tweet revived this long-running and still unproved rumor. He was citing an interview in The Washington Examiner, a conservative newspaper, with one anonymous female rancher who lives on the border.
“I’ve never seen any Middle Easterners — I’ve seen prayer rugs out here — but I’ve never seen any myself,” the woman, whose face is obscured, said in a videotaped interview.
A professor of Islamic studies at Indiana University, Asma Afsaruddin, said that prayer rugs were meant to be kept clean and doubted that they would be deserted by practicing Muslims.
“Standing in a clean place is a requirement of Islamic prayer,” she said.
“Many of these rugs have images of the Kaaba in Mecca and other religious symbols on them. For all these reasons, they would not be just casually tossed around or carelessly discarded to be desecrated by others,” the professor noted.
The rancher also told The Examiner that she had heard from Border Patrol agents that migration from countries other than Mexico “has really increased in the last couple years, but drastically even in the last six months.”
“Chinese, Germans, Russians, a lot of Middle Easterners,” she continued.
“Those Czechoslovakians they caught over on our neighbor this last summer,” Afsaruddin said.
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“There’s a lot of people coming in from not just from Mexico. People, the general public, just don’t get the terrorist facts of that,” the rancher concluded.
Trump refused to sign a short-term funding bill last week that would have pushed the spending fight to February, insisting that Congress allocate billions of dollars for the border wall.
The president also complained about Mexico stealing American jobs and undermining the auto industry and said Central America's violence-riddled Northern Triangle countries were 'taking advantage of the US for years.'
The deaths of two migrant children in just over two weeks raised strong new doubts about the ability of US border authorities to care for the thousands of minors arriving as part of a surge of families trying to enter the country.
Around 2,000 migrant children had been separated from their parents between mid-April and May 2018, because, unlike their parents, they are not charged with a crime.
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