This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

As America nears the 2024 presidential election, grave danger looms – and soon – warns a retired U.S. Navy commander and Republican candidate for Congress.

Jay Furman, running to represent Texas’ 28th Congressional District, a border district, served 28 years in the military before retiring to south Texas. He spoke to WND exclusively about the Biden administration’s unprecedented open-border policies, which he witnessed personally along the Texas-Mexico border. He characterizes the danger posed by unknown and too-often malevolent actors allowed to enter the country illegally as “an absolute country-killer.”

Having attended college in the Lone Star State decades ago, and now living in southern Texas, Furman told WND, "The border I left is not the border we have now."

Drug trafficking was once the most concerning problem associated with the U.S.-Mexico border, he explained.

“The symbiotic relationship with Mexico and its seasonal workers that would go back home to be with their families awhile, then come back to work [in the U.S.] was considered an amicable endeavor for all,” Furman said. “But here we are, years later, and the border is one of the worst borders I’ve ever seen.”

“The drug trade across the border is now completely out of control with no restraint in sight, and child sex trafficking has exploded to a level that’s unimaginable,” he pointed out. At the same time, record levels of people are crossing the Texas-Mexico border. In 2021, there were 1,115,906 illegal migrants who came across, while in 2022, there were 1,399,790.

Since 2021, there have been over seven million southwest land border encounters, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

What’s more, thousands of suspected terrorists and other nefarious actors are hiding in almost every urban area of the country.

Regarding that, Furman said, "Our country is being forced to see the consequences of weaponized mass migration – and it's reckless." For the retired Navy commander, "Weaponized mass migration is the most dangerous thing to modern civilizations, and most Americans don't understand that."

"It's an absolute country-killer, and the size of the human time bomb we've ingested, that we're all sitting on top of right now throughout the entire country, is gargantuan, and there's nothing to be done with it [from the Biden administration]," Furman pointed out. "These people aren't assimilating, and no one really knows where any of them are."

Furman is greatly concerned "things could go kinetic" before November, and some of the people who slipped across the southern border will engage various targets around the United States. "Or it could definitely happen after the election, depending on who wins," he added.

"Even if things don't go kinetic, potentially millions of people are just sitting here, and they need to be recognized as a threat," Furman said. "They don't need guns or uniforms, but what they need is an inflection point."

"Imagine the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020 multiplied by 100,000 and note that something could kick off before or after the election," Furman warned. In August 2001, he recalled, "Everyone was listening to the chatter, knowing something was going to come. Everyone was talking about it. Intelligence agencies were screaming about." And then a few weeks later, on September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 were killed and 6,000 others wounded in a series of terror attacks against the United States.

Considering the number of terrorists and other bad actors who have crossed America's southern border, Furman said: "Do we want to be standing in the rubble, or do we want to talk about solutions?" For Furman, "9/11 is a pinprick compared to what could come."

"We need to gather a bilateral consensus and do the best we can to stop this," he said. Dubbing the undocumented border crossings as "Biden's illegals" Furman said, "[the U.S. has to] make the attempt to deport as many of them as we can, messaging that if we catch you and you're illegal, you're going to be escorted out."

Apart from the physical dangers illegal immigrants, terrorists, and others pose to the country, Furman also noted an economic impact on the country as well as a moral shift. Regarding immigration, he said, the influx of people is "a tremendous burden on the system," explaining "We just can't afford to host this many people inside the country who aren't contributing to society." He warned, "We're walking into a scenario that is going to significantly depress everyone's standard of living."

And morally, he said, "There's an assault [by the LGBTQ+ community] on our culture, our schools, and our children." This, too, is part of a scheme by the left to destroy America, he argued.

"Each may seem like something that stuns us with a bloody nose, but each of these things is actually country killers," Furman asserted. "The American people have to get even more serious about these issues because we're under attack."