Six Middle Eastern men who were arrested in Arizona after illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in 2015 and were cited by right-wing blogs and news outlets to stoke terrorism fears and promote the need for tougher border control were actually victims, not terrorists.
Records obtained recently by the Associated Press show that the FBI had quickly cleared the men, five Pakistanis and one Afghan, of any terror-related suspicion after their November, 2015 arrest 15 miles north of the border. But that didn't stop Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey or right-wing news outlets from exploiting the incident to raise the specter of terror, a fear made fresh by the Paris attacks that occurred just days earlier.
Three days after the men were taken into custody, Ducey issued a statement calling the incident “very troubling, especially in light of new threats on the United States from ISIS in a video released in just the last 24 hours.” But federal authorities were not saying the same thing because, indeed, the men had been cleared.
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Not only that, the Associated Press discovered, the men were victims themselves of brutal human traffickers. The Afghan told Border Patrol agents that he had traveled for seven months to reach U.S. soil. He trekked through at least 10 countries before making it into Arizona before tripping a sensor and being arrested.
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