Ominously, on October 7, 2024, the American public received another stark warning. It is not just our allies on the other side of the world who are imperiled by radical Islamist terrorism. On the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ deadly terror attack on Israel, the FBI arrested Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi and an unnamed juvenile accomplice in Oklahoma City. The two were plotting an Election Day attack with the objective of slaughtering as many American voters as they could as they went to the polls.
Tawhedi is an Afghan national who arrived in the U.S. less than a month after the Biden administration’s chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan, which triggered an equally chaotic exodus of Afghan nationals attempting to reach the United States. Tawhedi reportedly told the FBI that the pair was acting on behalf of ISIS, an al-Qaeda offshoot, and that they expected to die as martyrs in the attack. Around the same time, a similar ISIS-inspired attack, involving two of Tawhedi’s brothers, was thwarted by French authorities.
The arrests demonstrate that ISIS is taking advantage of haphazard resettlement policies to carry out attacks in the West. The process of evacuating tens of thousands of unvetted Afghans to the United States was so haphazard that even the federal agencies directly involved in the process could not agree on how Tawhedi was allowed to enter the country. The Department of Justice (DOJ) initially claimed that he arrived in the United States on a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV), intended to help foreign nationals who assisted the U.S. government in Afghanistan. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) disputed that claim, contending that Tawhedi was paroled into the United States, an authority that the Biden-Harris administration has flagrantly abused to allow millions of otherwise inadmissible foreign nationals to enter the country. A full ten days after his arrest, the U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case finally confirmed that Tawhedi had been paroled into the U.S.
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What is clear is that the assurances of the Biden-Harris administration that the process for vetting the unprecedented wave of migrants arriving in the United States are false. In response to the news of the arrest, a senior administration official told NBC News, “Every Afghan resettled in the U.S. undergoes a rigorous screening and vetting process no matter which agency they worked with. That process includes checking against a full range of U.S. records and holdings.” In fact, in 2022, DHS itself conceded that they had “admitted or paroled [Afghan] evacuees who were not fully vetted into the United States.”
What is also clear is that Tawhedi is not the only serious threat to national security who has been allowed enter the United States due to the chaos the current administration has deliberately created at our borders. Reckless disregard for the core mission of DHS – namely, securing the homeland – abounds, as it has implemented policies that have resulted in more than 10 million people attempting to enter the country illegally, the majority of whom have been allowed to remain in the United States.
According to DHS’s own data, between FY 2021 and FY 2024, 392 individuals on the terror watch list were encountered attempting to enter the United States between ports of entry – an astounding 2,700 percent increase over the previous four years, when just 14 such individuals were encountered. Even more alarming is that amidst the border chaos of the past four years, at least 99 of those suspected terrorists were released into the country by Customs and Border Protection (CBP). And, of course, our ability to flag would-be terrorists is only as good as the databases that track them – which is to say, not all that reliable.
Over the same period there has been a sharp increase in encounters of Special Interest Aliens (SIAs) at our borders. More than 1.7 million SIAs – aliens with connections to 26 countries that DHS has deemed potential national security threats – have attempted to enter the U.S. between FY 2021 and FY 2024, many of whom were released from custody and are now freely roaming the country.
The deliberate chaos unleashed by Biden-Harris policies has also allowed some roughly two million illegal aliens to enter the country and elude capture by CBP. Alarmingly, ‘gotaways’ tend to be people who are prepared to take extra measures to get across the border undetected because they have criminal records or terrorist associations that increase the likelihood that they will be detained rather than released.
In short, the Biden-Harris administration has been playing Russian roulette with the security of the American public, releasing millions of migrants we know little about or what their motives are for being here. In testimony before Congress in June, FBI Director Christopher Wray, once again, warned of “the potential for a coordinated attack here in the homeland akin to the ISIS-K[horasan] attack we saw at the Russia Concert Hall in March. ” According to Wray, the FBI’s “most immediate concern has been that individuals or small groups will draw twisted inspiration from the events in the Middle East to carry out attacks here at home.”
For nearly four years, the Biden-Harris administration has put the interests of illegal aliens above U.S. citizens, ignoring the public safety and national security risks that result from its reckless policies. Without serious and immediate reforms to ensure that illegal aliens do not continue exploiting our unsecure borders, Director Wray’s worst fears may be realized.
Dan Stein is president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
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