a lot of crime comes from that location. >> back with me, nicholas rasmussen. olas, i know as director of the national counterterrorism center, which you were, that you also wrote a column on this. i'm curious your sense of the threat on the southern border. give me a reality check on this. >> well, alex, you know, i was more than content to stay out of the debate over border security, the question of whether, you know, migrants or illegal, undocumented people from overseas are coming across our southern border. it was really not my area of responsibility inside the government. but when the president and when the administration more broadly brought the terrorism question into play and used that as a rationale for what the administration is proposing on the wall and on border security, that's what led me to want to speak out. i felt like that the use of the idea somehow that terrorists were masked at the southern border and were taking advantage of our vulnerabilities at the southern border to infiltrate into the united states to carry out terrorist attacks, it j

nicholas rasmussen, he said there is no crisis that exists there. anyone bhmaking the argument is most likely guilt of fear mongering. those are the in facts. when i worked -- i did a lot ofwork in the area of combatting domestic terrorism at the justice department. we prosecuted a lot of extremists. and i did work on combatting violent extremism. we need to address homegrown terrorism. homegrown terrorists are a big part of the problem. unfortunately this administration has not been investing in necessary measures to prevent violent extreme. -- >> they have cut funding to combat domestic extremism. >> he makes it very easy to do so these days. he boxes democrats into a position where they are not treating whatever is wrong at the border as serious, our they're not sounding like they are, is that dangerous? they don't sound like they're taking it pretty seriously. >> hey, i spent over a dozen years of my life as a prosecutor. we take security seriously inside the united states or at our borders and you look at what president obama and others did to