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China Continues Funding Iran, Russia as Regime Sends Nationals through Southern Border

February 12, 2024

As the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues buying Iranian oil and helping Russia fund its war with Ukraine, Xi Jinping’s regime appears to be sending nationals into the United States through the porous southern border via at least one secretive camp deep in the Panamanian jungle.

During the February 2 episode of “The Tucker Carlson Podcast,” libertarian podcaster and author Bret Weinstein described a recent trip he took to the Darién Gap, a dense, rugged, mountainous jungle without roads in southern Panama in which migrants from South America hoping to make it to the U.S. must pass through. While touring some of the “transit camps” where migrants ready themselves for the trip north, Weinstein noted that “people are coming from the Middle East. We met Afghans, we met people from the Caribbean, Haitians, people from Yemen, Iran. It’s shocking, really. This looks superficially like the migration of Central Americans … but that’s not the whole story.”

Weinstein went on to describe a transit camp at San Vicente, which was “almost entirely Chinese.” He noted that unlike at other camps that he visited, he was not allowed to enter the San Vicente camp and interact with people. However, he was able to interact with a few of the Chinese nationals outside the camp. “They are the opposite of forthcoming,” he explained. “They have no interest in talking to outsiders. … It is not a friendly migration. These Chinese folks [were] overwhelmingly male, military age. … There were few if any children in the Chinese migration. [Children] were everywhere in the other places we visited.”

“The sense of … hostility that I felt from the Chinese was particularly unsettling given that I know where they’re headed. … They’re headed to the U.S.,” Weinstein underscored. “… I believe their government has some reason to facilitate [this].”

Meanwhile, Radio Free Europe published a report in January detailing how China clandestinely buys oil from Iran. It describes how a “dark fleet” of oil tankers off the shores of Singapore exchange cargo. “The fleet has grown steadily over the past five years, delivering Iranian crude to China as the countries work in concert to circumvent international sanctions that target Tehran’s lucrative oil exports,” the report describes.

As has been firmly established, the Islamist regime of Iran is the “foremost state sponsor” of a host of international terrorist organizations, including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and more.

Recently, Senator Kevin Cramer (R-S.D.) joined “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” to describe how China is helping to bankroll America’s adversaries, even as the Biden administration continues to make friendly overtures with the communist regime.

“[T]hey’re able to sell Iranian oil to China … on the black market,” he noted. “[T]hey sell to these ‘teapot refineries,’ which are sort of off the grid, but not really off the grid, and we look the other way. This is all part of playing nice, but we’re playing nice with two enemies when we should be sanctioning that oil like Donald Trump did. We should be protecting that oil from even getting to China.”

Cramer continued, “We need to be much more assertive about our economic sanctions, oil sanctions, the trade between these enemy countries and make it darn hard on them to collaborate with one another and to fund their terror. And at the same time, places like North Dakota and Texas and Oklahoma and a whole bunch of other places [like] Alaska have plenty of clean oil that is produced by good, free people [who are] happy to sell around the world and not fund terrorism with it.”

Perkins pointed out that “many U.S. companies are investing in Chinese technology, and they’re aiding the CCP.”

“[T]he fact that we haven’t learned this lesson yet is shame on us,” Cramer concurred. “[D]ecades ago, when we let China into [the World Trade Organization] and gave them favored nation status, that happened with the hope that they’d become more like us. Well, all they’ve done is exploited us with our own weakness. But the fact that Wall Street and our own corporate citizens are still drawn to that incredible market because they love the cash more than anything, or the fact that we still import cheap stuff from China that is made with slave labor in some cases — certainly unfair labor, certainly unfair conditions, certainly much more polluting factories. … The fact that we still allow it at all is mind-numbing to me, and we’ve got to do a lot more.”

In December, Cramer joined Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and six other senators in introducing the Iran China Accountability Act, which “would block any taxpayer dollars from being used to advance an Iran nuclear agreement until they terminate cash ties with China and terminate ties to terrorist groups such as Hamas.”

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.