Imagining that trained Chinese agents are operating inside the United States is not hard to do considering the record number of self-identified Chinese nationals appearing at the border to request asylum. According to figures from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Border Patrol encounters with Chinese nationals jumped from 1,970 in fiscal year 2022 to 24,048 in fiscal year 2023.
That increase is a whopping 1,100% jump in one year.
In June, Rep. Mark Green (R-TN), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, warned that Chinese military personnel could be crossing the nation’s southern border. Tipped off by a Border patrol sector chief, he said he was informed a large number of those asylum seekers have “known ties” to the People’s Liberation Army, the official name of China’s military.
If war breaks out over Taiwan, even a squad-sized army of trained agents from the PLA or the Ministry of State Security could hit civilian targets and military targets across the United States.
That scenario concerns John Mills, a retired U.S. Army colonel who is now a national security expert at the Center for Security Policy. Suspecting that trained agents are now on U.S. soil, Mills likens them to Russia’s so-called “little green men” that are now well known to military experts and historians.
When it invaded neighboring Georgia in 2008, Russia depended on an advance guard of trained soldiers inside the country. Russia also used a similar tactic in Crimea in 2014.
“The little green man, in national security terms, has become sort of the nom de guerre for operatives who are already in place and who essentially enable a takeover,” Mills explains.
Some of the Chinese who have crossed the border into the United States, he believes, are “Chinese paramilitary acting as advance force operators.”
South of the U.S.-Mexico border, Mills believes the powerful and violent drug cartels are cooperating with the Chinese government. Both the cartels and the CCP have the same goal, he says, which is to destabilize their enemy, the United States.
