After Four Years of Open Borders, Regime Change is a Dicey and Dangerous Proposition.

Reverse-engineer the conditions required for foreign sleeper cells to take root in America, and you get Biden’s border policies.

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Americans have learned this the hard way: regime change is never tidy.

Iraq was supposed to be quick. Libya was supposed to be limited. Afghanistan was supposed to be stabilizing.

Instead, each intervention unraveled into something far messier — destabilized regions, proxy wars, refugee surges, and cascading second- and third-order consequences no one fully modeled at the outset.

Even setting aside questions of efficacy or necessity, regime change is inherently risky.

But attempting this in Iran, especially after four years of a historically chaotic border policy, is risk layered on risk.

Under President Joe Biden, more than ten million illegal aliens entered the United States. The true number is likely higher. Much higher. And when precise figures are unavailable, that opacity itself becomes part of the risk calculation.

Within the known flow of people, there are massive, clear-cut red flags. Biden’s border policies, in effect, amounted to a near–perfectly reverse-engineered blueprint for how foreign sleeper cells could embed and operate inside the United States.

If that sounds harsh, look at the data.

Since 2021, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has recorded hundreds of encounters with individuals whose names matched the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center watchlist. One congressional tally cites 388 apprehensions between ports of entry through at least 2024. In 2023 alone, 169 such encounters were reported.

And these were just the terrorists who were caught.

More concerningly, a separate congressional report states that at least 99 individuals on that watchlist were released into the United States between 2021 and 2023.

How many more crossed undetected? How many were released without public disclosure? The Biden administration has not been forthright with this data. Much of it remains unknown, and uncertainty at this scale is not neutral. It is a glaring vulnerability.

Meanwhile, encounters involving Iranian nationals at the southern border rose sharply — from 48 in 2021 to nearly 800 by 2024. Over four years, 1,504 Iranian nationals were apprehended. Roughly 729 were released.

There has been no transparent accounting of how many of those releases intersected with watchlist databases.

And federal authorities are clearly aware of the broader threat environment.

In mid-2025, the Department of Homeland Security issued a National Terrorism Advisory System bulletin warning of a heightened threat climate tied to global instability and tensions involving Iran. Around the same time, reporting described a memo from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner noting that the threat picture connected to Iran had intensified.

So this is the posture:

Record migration.

Known terrorist encounters.

Unknown terrorist releases.

Record escalation with Iran.

Here, history offers a simple lesson.

When great powers destabilize regions abroad, retaliation rarely confines itself neatly to foreign battlefields. Modern conflict is asymmetric. It targets pressure points. It exploits access. It leverages ambiguity.

And an unsecured homeland becomes a pressure point.

Europe learned during the 2015 migrant surge that sheer scale can overwhelm systems. Several perpetrators of the November 2015 Paris attacks exploited these gaps during a period of strained intake capacity. Even Israel, with its enviably secure border, wasn’t immune from a catastrophic attacks by Hamas on October 7th, 2023. It’s clear determined, well-organized proxies of Iran can exploit gaps in even the most sophisticated defenses.

The United States does not need to look abroad for reminders that instability can echo at home. Take the tragic killing of National Guard Specialist Sarah Beckstrom in Washington, D.C. by Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal, underscoring how fragile the domestic security environment can become when screening and enforcement fail.

In practice, Hezbollah — Iran’s most capable proxy — has not treated the United States as off-limits. Federal prosecutors have dismantled Hezbollah-linked networks here before, including a North Carolina cigarette-smuggling ring that quietly funneled millions overseas. Subsequent investigations exposed drug trafficking and money laundering operations tied to the group that moved through American financial channels.

Hamas has done the same. The 2008 Holy Land Foundation case — the largest terrorism-financing prosecution in U.S. history — revealed that millions of dollars were routed through U.S.-based charities to Hamas-controlled entities abroad. For years, the support network operated behind the façade of nonprofit work.

If escalation with Iran intensifies, Washington cannot assume the consequences will remain overseas. That is the part policymakers rarely say out loud.

Foreign intervention presumes domestic stability.

After four years of open borders, that presumption no longer holds.

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