Two days. That’s how long it took for the celebration to become a warning.

Saturday, the U.S. and Israel launched “Operation Roaring Lion” and took out the top tier of Iran’s regime — including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself. It was a historic strike. A decisive blow against a terror state that has chanted “Death to America” for nearly five decades.

And by Monday morning, a former DHS advisor was on Fox News telling Americans that the next attack might not come from overseas. It might already be here. Waiting.

The Man Sounding the Alarm

Charles Marino isn’t a cable news pundit farming clicks. He’s a former Secret Service supervisory agent and DHS advisor — the kind of guy who spent his career assessing threats that most people never hear about until it’s too late.

His message Monday was blunt: raise the national terror threat level. Now.

“We are facing a wide variety of threats here, and the problem is, they’re all located within our own borders right now,” Marino said.

Not overseas. Not in some distant staging ground. Here. Inside the country. Already positioned. Already waiting.

The Border They Broke

Marino didn’t mince words about how we got here. The Biden administration turned the southern border into what he called “a sieve,” and the consequences aren’t hypothetical anymore. They’re operational.

Four years of gutted asylum enforcement. Exploited temporary protective status programs. A legal immigration system so riddled with weaknesses that hostile actors could walk through it like a revolving door. And they did.

The result isn’t just a population of undocumented migrants looking for work. It’s communities that, in Marino’s words, “have been allowed to segregate themselves based on culture and ideologies” — creating pockets where radicalization can take root, grow quietly, and wait for a trigger.

A trigger like, say, the assassination of a Supreme Leader.

The Sleeper Cell Problem

This is the part Washington doesn’t want to talk about. Not the border crossings. Not the asylum fraud. The sleeper cells.

Security officials are now warning that Iranian-linked operatives who infiltrated the United States during the border crisis may be preparing to act in response to the strikes. These aren’t theoretical actors on a whiteboard in some analyst’s office. These are people who crossed the border, settled in, blended in, and have been waiting for exactly this kind of geopolitical moment.

Marino confirmed what anyone paying attention already suspected: “There’s no doubt that law enforcement and intelligence agencies are operating at an elevated threat level here in the United States.”

They’re operating at an elevated level. But the official National Terrorism Advisory System level hasn’t been raised. That disconnect should bother everyone.

Austin Was the Preview

While Marino was issuing his warning, federal authorities were still investigating a deadly shooting at a Texas bar as a possible act of terrorism. The suspected gunman was photographed carrying a rifle and wearing a hoodie with a reference to “Allah.” Three dead. Fourteen wounded. In Austin, Texas. At a bar.

This wasn’t a military installation or a government building. It was a place where people went to have a drink on a weekend. And that’s exactly the point. The targets aren’t strategic — they’re soft. Restaurants, bars, concerts, subway stations. The places where normal Americans live their normal lives, assuming someone else is handling the security.

Former ATF Special Agent Bernard Zapor put it plainly: “Our public safety has to be paramount above all. National security and public safety are the paramounts of our democracy.”

The Funding Fight That Could Get People Killed

And here’s where the politics turn genuinely dangerous. While security experts are begging for heightened alert levels and law enforcement is scrambling to track potential threats, Democrats in Congress are stalling DHS funding.

Read that again. The department responsible for preventing terrorist attacks on American soil is facing a funding battle — right now, at the exact moment when the threat level is spiking because America just helped kill the leader of a state sponsor of terrorism.

Kevin McCarthy urged Democrats to “do your job” as the funding stall continues. He shouldn’t have to. When national security experts are on morning television warning about sleeper cells, the idea that funding for the Department of Homeland Security is being held hostage for political leverage isn’t just irresponsible. It’s reckless on a level that borders on criminal negligence.

The Uncomfortable Truth

The strikes against Iran were necessary. The regime was racing toward nuclear weapons. They funded terrorism across the globe. They killed Americans. Taking out their leadership was the right call, and Trump and Netanyahu deserve credit for the courage to make it.

But courage has consequences. And the consequence of hitting Iran’s regime this hard is that every asset they’ve ever planted, every cell they’ve ever funded, every radicalized individual they’ve ever cultivated inside our borders just got activated — at least psychologically, and potentially operationally.

We spent four years with a border that functioned like an open invitation. We have no reliable count of who came in, where they are, or what they’re planning. And the one department responsible for connecting those dots is fighting for its budget while senators play politics.

Marino is right. Raise the threat level. Fund the department. And stop pretending that the border crisis was just about immigration.

It was always about security. And right now, the bill is coming due.