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House Committee Demands Answer on Eight Tajik Border Crossers Arrested for Terror Plot

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1 year ago

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By Todd Bensman as published June 17, 2024 by The New York Post

House Republicans are demanding answers after an FBI counterterrorism sting in three major US cities reportedly rolled up eight Tajik nationals who’d crossed the US Southwest Border and were planning a terrorist bombing.

In a new letter, House Homeland Security Committee Mark Green and several subcommittee leaders are demanding that Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of Homeland Security, disclose whether border agencies could have known of terrorism connections when the Tajik Eight first crossed, and how those agencies handled the immigrants after their releases through to the moment the FBI alerted them about plot.

At least some of the Tajik Eight crossed more than a year prior to their early June 2024 arrests by ICE. And the undercover FBI sting operation was underway for quite some time, according to media reporting.

Their letter points to an NBC news report that ICE in the first week of June arrested the Tajik Eight on immigration-related charges only “after the FBI alerted them that the men possessed a connection to the terrorist group ISIS.”

The lawmakers are investigating whether overwhelmed border agency personnel are able to properly screen terrorists and other criminals.

The committee cites my report listing seven accidental terror suspect releases – each a counterterrorism intelligence failure – and its call for forceful congressional intervention and concerted government investigation.

“Unfortunately, the unacceptable security failures that have allowed individuals with terrorist ties to enter the United States through the Southwest Border have become an alarming pattern under the administration,” the letter states.

Six suspected terrorists with ISIS ties arrested in sting operation in New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia: sources

The committee, which holds special oversight responsibility for all homeland security-related government activity, wants the immigration files on all eight suspects, communications between the FBI and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement that would reveal how the eight arrested immigrants were handled after their border crossings, and all derogatory information in the terrorist watch list database about them.

They want a briefing by June 27 and the documents and records later.

But if history is any indication, Mayorkas is likely to ignore this reasonable public interest request.

Mayorkas has already blown off an April 3, 2024 committee information request about two of the DHS accidental releases of border-crossing suspected terrorists on the FBI watch list “due to errors within ICE’s internal database.”

An especially egregious security failure happened with the accidental border release of Afghan national Mohammad Kharwin, who was already on the FBI’s terrorism watch list for his associations with the US-designated terrorist organization Hezb-e-Islami.

Border Patrol released him into ICE custody into the so-called “Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program on March 12, 2023 after his illegal crossing from Mexico into California. He remained free for nearly a year until his arrest in San Antonio.

“The Department’s prioritization of catch, process, and release, presents a grave danger to national security,” the letter said. “The Committee has repeatedly and forcefully highlighted the security vulnerabilities inherent in the massive influx of illegal aliens at our border. The Biden Administration and the Department, however, continue to hide their heads in the sand, ignoring the ‘blinking red lights’ everywhere.”

Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, is the author of “America’s Covert Border War” (2021).

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Deportations causing delays in US construction industry

Published on September 16, 2025

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From The Center Square

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The Trump administration’s immigration policies are leading to worker shortages and delayed projects across the construction industry, according to a new report.

A survey conducted in July and August by the Associated Contractors of America and the National Center for Construction Education and Research found more than one in four respondents said their firms were affected by increased immigration enforcement in the past six months.

Respondents said increased immigration enforcement is making it more difficult for firms to recruit workers. Ten percent of firms reported using the H-2B visa program, which is used for recruiting nonagricultural foreign workers, to recruit salaried and hourly workers.

Congress set the cap for H-2B visa allowances at 66,000 in fiscal year 2026. The program offers temporary work for the first and second halves of the year to foreign employees.

Jordan Fischetti, an immigration policy fellow with Americans for Prosperity, said government allowances for visa programs do not meet the demand of the current workforce.

“Immigration for a long time has been centrally planned, so there’s just not a very strong appetite for letting the market do its work,” Fischetti said.

The report found 83% of firms with craft worker openings reported that positions are hard to fill or harder to fill than one year ago. Eighty-four percent of firms with openings for salaried workers also reported it was hard or harder to fill positions than one year ago.

Five percent of respondents reported their jobsites or work sites were visited by immigration agents and 10% said workers did not report or quit due to rumored immigration enforcement allegations.

Contractors in Georgia, Virginia, Alabama, Nebraska and South Carolina were more likely to be impacted by immigration enforcement, according to the report.

The report found worker shortages were the most commonly listed reason for project delays. Two-thirds of firms reported at least one project in the last six months was postponed, canceled or scaled back. The survey took into account more than 1,300 individuals across various contracting and construction firms.

Michele Waslin, assistant director of the University of Minnesota’s immigration history research center, said the construction and agricultural industries have been deeply affected by the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

“Some businesses really do have a labor shortage, and they’re unable to hire American workers, and they want to hire foreign workers and it’s not that easy to do in many cases,” Waslin said.

A separate poll commissioned by The Center Square found 85% of registered voters think it is either somewhat or very important to create legal pathways for construction workers to live and work in the United States.

The poll, conducted by RMG Research in conjunction with Neapolitan News Service, surveyed 1,000 registered voters in August and found vast agreement across partisan lines, age and race in its support for legal pathways in construction.

Fischetti said both employers and the American public have expressed interest in allowing more flexibility in the immigration system and he wants to see Congress modernize in response.

“We really need to work on providing pathways,” Fischetti said. “I don’t just mean pathways to legalization, pathways to certainty.”

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Duane Rolheiser

Unite the Kingdom Rally: demonstrators take to the streets in historical numbers to demand end to mass migration in the UK

Published on September 16, 2025

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If you haven’t been following the emergence of controversial UK journalist Tommy Robinson, you should try not to skip ahead to the aerial shot of what is likely the largest rally in modern UK history.

To even begin to understand the scope of the passion and to comprehend the numbers of English people who attended the “Unite the Kingdom Rally” in London on Saturday, some background information will be very helpful.

Like many western nations, Britain has seen an historical influx of immigrants.  With millions of new immigrants competing for housing, medical care, and government resources, very serious issues are bound to arise.  It makes you wonder how a government could or why a government would allow this to happen.

The following video shows very well what has taken place in terms of how many people have arrived in recent years, and who they are.

As the presenter showed, most of these migrants are from non European Union nations.  Many are from Muslim nations.  That means even in a highly multi-cultural nation like the UK, towns and cities are facing the cultural challenges of suddenly hosting a significant minority of young Muslim men.

Enter the most controversial political figure in Britain, Tommy Robinson.  Robinson’s hometown of Luton, Bedfordshire, England, was one of the first communities in the UK to see a significant percentage of Muslim population.  According to Robinson he noticed his childhood schoolyard and lunchrooms were divided into two separate groups, the traditional English (white Europeans, people from India, and the Caribbean, etc) and the Muslims.

As he got older Robinson claims he started to see a number of young girls being ‘recruited’ by older Muslim men into the drug culture, and becoming sexual partners for multiple Muslim men, including prominent members of the community.  When Robinson started to speak out publicly he was hit with a wall of official denials.  He would go on to challenge the authorities for years, becoming a citizen journalist and eventually an enemy of the state. If you watch his documentary series called The Rape of Britain you will understand just what he’s been claiming for about 15 years.

Fast forward to September of 2025.  The streets of many cities in the UK resemble Robinson’s hometown of Luton.  Robinson’s followers have multiplied from hundreds to thousands, to potentially millions.  The situation has caught the attention of President Donald Trump and X owner Elon Musk. On the weekend, untold thousands of Britons took to the streets of London for Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom March”, a massive rally for free speech and British identity.

Without watching Robinson’s documentaries and journalism it can be difficult to understand the passion of his presentation from Saturday.  The growing thousands and millions in the UK understand.  Those who do not are very likely swayed by the media and government establishment who are trying desperately and less successfully by the day to brand Robinson as a Far Right racist.

Tommy Robinson appeared to be losing the battle for public opinion until Elon Musk stepped in.  Robinson was in jail last January when Musk took note and used his incredible social media reach to bring Robinson’s struggle to a much wider audience.

The owner of the X platform addressed the crowd via video link. In the days following the public execution of Charlie Kirk, Musk condemned the left as “the party of murder” and accused Britain’s political establishment of weaponizing mass migration to reshape the electorate.

 

Prime Minister Keir Starmer was quick to denounce the march while Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said the vast majority of demonstrators are “good, ordinary decent people” voicing legitimate concerns about mass migration and the safety of British streets.  At least 25 arrests were made Saturday and police say four police officers were seriously injured.

As for Tommy Robinson, he likely over achieved any expectations he had for this rally and now both he and the UK authorities are planning their next moves.

 

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