An illegal immigrant caught trespassing into the United States through the southern border, revealed he was here to “make a bomb.”
Federal court documents revealed that a member of the terrorist group Hezbollah told law enforcement agents that he was planning to make a bomb in the U.S. after illegally entering the country through the Texas border.
According to a March 19 federal court document, Basel Bassel Ebbadi spent many years training with the Hizballah terrorist group and, focusing on "jihad" and “was taught to kill people who were not Muslim.”
In a criminal complaint, Border Patrol agent Jose Benitez-Medina wrote that the 22-year-old illegal terrorist unlawfully crossed into the U.S. roughly four miles from the Bridge of The Americas Port of Entry in El Paso.
Included in the complaint, Benitez-Medina listed several different aliases Hezbollah terrorists go by including, Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine, Islamic Jihad, Organization of Right Against Wrong, Followers of the Prophet Muhammad, and the Revolutionary Justice Organization.
According to reports for the terror watchlist for fiscal year 2023 from Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), there have been at least 154 encounters at the northern and southern borders among ports of entry and 505 encountered at the ports of entry.
In addition, 98 illegal immigrants were on a terror watchlist in fiscal 2022. That number jumped to 172 in 2023, and just in the first four months of fiscal 2024, border agents encountered 59 terrorist-linked individuals.
As illegal immigrants continue to flood into the U.S. under President Joe Biden’s open border, there has been an extreme uptick in potential terrorist-linked illegal aliens making their way across the border.
Most recently, FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that a “wide array of very dangerous threats emanate from” the southern border.
“There is a particular network that has, where some of the overseas facilitators of the smuggling network have ISIS ties that we’re very concerned about and that we’ve been spending an enormous amount of effort with our partners that we’re investigating,” Wray said.
The Biden Administration’s 2024 Homeland Threat Assessment warns that “terrorists” are among those illegally crossing the U.S. border and “may exploit the elevated flow and increasingly complex security environment to enter the United States.”
“Individuals with potential terrorism connections continue to attempt to enter the Homeland illegally between ports of entry…via the southern border,” the assessment reads, tallying that 160 terror suspects were actually detained crossing in fiscal 2023,” the report read.
According to documents obtained by the New York Post, Benitez-Medina will be deported from the U.S. However, it is unclear which country he will go back to.