The borders remain the path of least resistance into the country. Do we feel lucky enough to keep them largely undefended?

WASHINGTON, Jan. 19 (UPI) -- A drug-trafficker who admitted importing a quarter-ton of cocaine from Mexico also plotted to smuggle 20 men he said were Iraqi terrorists into the United States, charging them $8000 a head.

In December 2004, Noel Exinia told associates in wiretapped and consensually recorded conversations that the men were "gente de Osama" -- Osama's guys -- and that they were "really bad people," who were armed and made the smugglers working with them afraid, according to papers filed last week by the U.S. Justice Department with the federal court in Brownsville, Texas.

In the papers, prosecutors say that Exinia was asked to move the men in by his boss in the notorious Gulf Cartel, a Mexican drug smuggling and organized crime network.

His case turned out to be either a fantasy or a bluff--he apparently didn't smuggle any of "Osama's guys" into the US across the Mexican border. But others have:

A naturalized citizen faces charges in Michigan as the head of a ring that smuggled 200 mainly Iraqi illegal immigrants into the United States since 2001.

Iraqi-born Neeran Hakim Zaia was indicted in October 2004 along with her husband and three others following an undercover investigation spanning three continents that lasted more that three years and cost millions of dollars, U.S. officials familiar with the case told UPI last year.

And other federal officials tell UPI that Zaia is just one of a handful of so-called Tier One human trafficking targets in the sights of federal investigators and U.S. intelligence agencies concerned about their links to "special interest" countries -- those where global Islamic terrorists are thought to have a foothold.