House chairman: ISIS a threat to US homeland

House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) warned on Sunday that foreign fighters returning to America after fighting in the Middle East for groups like the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) pose a serious threat to the United States. 

“We’ve had hundreds of Americans travel to fight in the region and some of those have returned. Talk about barbarians at the gate — we need to keep them out of the gate and we need to monitor those who have gotten through the gate,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“We don’t want to see what happened in Paris happen here in the United States.”

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson pushed back on those warnings Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” He said that while “people should be vigilant,” Americans should have “confidence in our homeland security.”

“Obviously, there is an unknown factor, but I believe we have the system in pace to do a pretty good job at tracking these individuals,” he said.

McCaul said that there are now 20,000 foreign fighters in the region, 5,000 of whom hold Western passports. 

As American leaders bank on a coalition effort with American airstrikes and support augmenting Arab forces on the ground, McCaul said that the brutal killing of a Jordanian pilot could motivate Arab nations to make a stronger effort to fight ISIS militants. 

“I think if anything, the lighting on fire of this Jordanian pilot will now galvanize, I hope, the Arab nations to fight ISIS,” he said, adding that it’s not enough to use the repeated adage that this is the Arab nations’ fight.

“It’s also the United States’ fight because we don’t want them to attack us in our homeland,” he said.

“We’re worried about not only the foreign fighters, but also the homegrown violent extremists that can look on the internet and get radicalized over the internet here in the United States.”