A Washington state Republican congressional candidate who also worked at the CIA said that the same Iranian proxies who are responsible for the deaths of three American service members in Jordan last week have "certainly already penetrated our borders."
Joe Kent, also a retired Army Special Forces Chief Warrant Officer, made the assertion in an interview with Breitbart published Thursday.
"Iran fights by proxies. Their proxies have definitely infiltrated our wide-open southern border," Kent told Breitbart.
"Iran has most certainly already penetrated our borders. We've got to get serious about securing our border and starting to track down, locate and deport all the people that have penetrated our borders," he added.
His assertion is one of many made by Republican lawmakers over the past few months, most recently by Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., who was part of the Republican delegation that visited the border at Eagle Pass, Texas, last month.
"I am 100% certain that we are going to suffer another terror attack on U.S. soil and you're going to be able to trace it back to this," Fitzpatrick, a former FBI agent who spent his career in counterintelligence, told DailyMail.com.
The U.S. has fingered the Iran-backed Islamic Resistance in Iraq as the group likely to have carried out the deadly attack on Saturday on Tower 22 in Jordan. Kent lost his wife, Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent, to a suicide bombing in Manbij, Syria, in 2019.
Kent is running against incumbent Democrat Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who defeated Kent in 2022. He also has a primary battle from fellow GOP candidate Leslie Lewallen.
"(Perez) fully supports Biden's agenda of giving Iran untold billions and billions of dollars, while at the same time voting to leave our southern border wide open in lockstep with the most radical wing of the Democratic Party," he said. "She is absolutely incapable of defending the country."
Kent is also calling for the Biden administration to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq and Syria, where they're "sitting ducks." Because of Iran's proxy warfare, Kent asserted the U.S. needs to get its distance from Iran and then exact retaliation for last week.
"Let's get our troops out of there. Let the Iranians declare victory and say, 'Oh, we drove America out.' Let them have that temporary victory. And then once our forces are out away from striking distance, then we can strike back against Iranian Quds Force officers, their special operators and against Iranian proxy groups in Iraq and Syria."