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Chronic Counter-terrorism Lapses at the Border

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A US Customs and Border Patrol agent monitors the barrier separating the U.S. and Mexico in Nogales, Arizona. (Photo: Manuela Durson)

By Todd Bensman

Originally published by Jewish Policy Center

In the early morning hours of May 3, a Jordanian immigrant who illegally crossed the US-Mexico border a month earlier joined with another illegally present Jordanian. Together they drove a large box truck to the entry gates of Quantico Marine Corps Base in northern Virginia.

The driver announced they were Amazon subcontractors there to make a delivery to the Quantico town post office just inside. But after neither could produce credentials and were denied entry, the driver hit the gas in an apparent attempt to plow the truck through and into the base’s target-rich interior. Quick-thinking military sentries raised automatic road barricades, arrested the pair for trespassing, and turned them over to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Local media soon reported that one of the Jordanians was on the FBI’s terrorism watch list.

The White House and all involved federal agencies have steadfastly stonewalled questions as to whether an illegal, border-crossing alien from Jordan on the FBI’s terrorism watch list had just attempted a jihad-motivated attack on US soil for the first known time. It is an often ridiculed scenario, but one that government experts have been warning about, including the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) own 2024 threat assessment, since the worst mass migration crisis in US history began on January 20, 2021 – President Joe Biden’s Inauguration Day.

Among the estimated seven million illegal immigrants from 160 countries around the world that Border Patrol agents encountered in just the few years since were 362 illegal immigrants who were on the FBI’s terrorism watch list – all detained.

But the fact that one of these border-crossing Jordanians was reportedly on the FBI’s watch list – and nevertheless was NOT detained but left free inside the country to ram a large truck through into an important military base – is emblematic of a serious new kind of national security threat to the US homeland.

Mohammad Kharwin

In at least seven recent cases, Border Patrol agents, overwhelmed by the crisis, have accidentally released illegal border-crossers who were on the US terror watch list. Their belated discoveries prompted panicked nationwide manhunts to round them up before they could conduct terror attacks. Was the Jordanian at Quantico one of them? No one knows.

But a twice-freed Afghan national man was the most recent of these. The 48-year-old Mohammad Kharwin roamed America for 11 months between his border crossing and his capture. This case and too many others demand that the federal government acknowledge emergence of a patterned new chronic national security emergency requiring elevation to the highest priority within the intelligence community, federal law enforcement, and Congress.

An overwhelmed Border Patrol freed Kharwin into America on March 10, 2023, before agents could confirm the FBI watch list hit that initially flagged him and then, a swamped Texas immigration court freed a second time in February.

By current public accounts, an initial Border Patrol database check flagged Kharwin for membership in Hezb-e-Islami, which the US Director of National Intelligence (DNI) describes as a “virulently anti-Western insurgent group.” He illegally crossed the California border in March 2023, one of 23,286 illegal aliens caught crossing that month in what would turn out to be a record-breaking year for the agency’s San Diego Border Sector. All told, there were 230,941 illegal crossers caught in 2023, up nearly 60,000 from 2022 and 90,000 more than 2021.

That extraordinary traffic no doubt strained all normal Border Patrol counterterrorism and vetting processes.

Instead of keeping Kharwin detained as a “special interest alien,” tagged until standard face-to-face interviews and corroboration of the initial hit was complete, Border Patrol agents – under orders from Washington – waved him through like millions of other illegal crossers on “Alternatives to Detention” (ATD) personal recognizance papers, where crossers agree to voluntarily report later to ICE in a city of their choice.

NBC reports that Border Patrol never even informed ICE of the initial FBI watch-list flagging, which is evidently how the same collapsed border management system missed a second opportunity to catch Kharwin in late January of this year, when he showed up before an immigration judge in a Pearsall, TX, ICE detention facility for a hearing. Perhaps because ICE still didn’t have the initial terrorism flag hit, that agency’s court lawyer representative did not report it to the judge, or appeal, when Kharwin was ordered released on $12,000 bond for a distant 2025 hearing.

“The judge placed no restrictions on his movements inside the US” in the meantime, NBC reported.

Somehow, the FBI figured all of this out and got word to ICE agents to find and arrest Kharwin, which they did a month later, on February 28, in nearby San Antonio.

And Others

To date, only one federal investigation has produced a public report branding the problem, remarkable but forgotten or given short shrift by major US news media, although I did write about it. That eye-opening document was the DHS inspector general’s office report about the April 19, 2022 crossing and mistaken release of a Colombian on the FBI watch list. ICE agents were not able to track him down to Florida for two long weeks.

Its key finding was that Border Patrol and ICE agents couldn’t do normal counterterrorism protocols because they were simply too “busy processing an increased flow of migrants.”

But these six other cases qualify as investigation-worthy.

In February 2024, North Carolina authorities arrested an immigrant, Awet Hagos, reportedly from Eritrea, for allegedly firing a rifle outside a Carolina Quick Stop store in the small town of Eure. He then attacked responding Gates County Sheriff’s deputies and barricaded himself in a four-hour standoff with them. Sheriff Ray Campbell reported that an ICE fingerprints check revealed that Hagos was on the watch list, the sheriff later told local news. North Carolina’s Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, running for the governor’s office this November, penned a letter to President Biden demanding answers about Hagos. But these moves drew scant coverage from local newspapers and gained no known traction.

In February 2024, a Pakistani illegal immigrant on the watch list who had crossed from Mexico into California, was accidentally released for a day before US authorities, luckily, uncovered the release error and caught up with him.

In late 2023, New York police arrested a Senegalese man wanted in his home country for “terrorist activities” who somehow got into the American interior.

In 2022, Border Patrol waved through a watch-listed Somali member of the al-Shabaab terrorist group near San Diego. He was free for nearly a year before authorities untangled their mistake and finally picked him up in Minneapolis.

Also in 2022, ICE released an FBI watch-listed Lebanon-born Venezuelan who had crossed from Matamoros into Brownsville, TX. Washington ordered him released on grounds that the man was at risk of catching Covid. This release occurred against ardent FBI recommendations that he remain in detention because he was both dangerous and a flight risk. FBI documents on this case leaked, no doubt out of an overabundance of frustration among those in the intelligence community who dealt with it. I have them.

A late 2021 accidental release case of Yemen national Ahmed Mohammed Ahmed shows that Mexico too is struggling with the Biden-fomented mass migration crisis. Mexico has long been a close partner of the United States in counterterrorism at the border. But in this case, Mexico released the Yemeni terrorism suspect without informing its US partners, resulting in a “Be On the Lookout” bulletin that made its way to me about a manhunt alert that went out on the Texas side of the border.

How Many Have we Missed?

Terrorism threat border lights have been flashing red for some time now just from the hundreds who were actually caught and detained, especially since the US Customs and Border Protection agency in March 2022 began publishing “Terrorist Screening Data Set Encounters” by the month on its public-facing website. Those began breaking all national records when the Biden government took office in January 2021, when apprehended illegal border crossers on the FBI watch list ballooned from a mere three during Trump’s last fiscal year in office to 15, then by another 98 in fiscal 2022, then 169 in fiscal 2023, and another 80 through April 2024.

That all those who were caught is less a positive national security accomplishment than an unacceptable sampling of much bigger flows of watch-listed illegal aliens coming into America who are not caught and handled. If some two million of these so-called “got-aways” went through since 2021 (like Kharwin evidently tried to, or possibly the Jordanian at Quantico), more suspected terrorists on the FBI watch list are almost certainly among them.

In recent months, the terrorism threat at the border has generated some public concern, but almost never explicitly about the preventable accidental releases of terrorist suspects authorities later had to chase down.

In September 2023, I testified about the accidental release problem before the US House Subcommittee on the Judiciary in juxtaposition with my 2021 book America’s Covert Border War, which revealed counterterrorism programs at the border that have kept the nation safe from infiltrated attacks for nearly 20 years. I told the members that Biden’s border crisis had severely compromised those old programs and caused a spate of accidental terror suspect releases, which elevated the threat of terror attack as a result.

Until then, concern was on the rise but never explicitly named accidental releases as a problem.

Threat Assessment 2024

The Biden Administration’s own 2024 Homeland Threat Assessment generally warns that “terrorists may exploit the elevated flow and increasingly complex security environment to enter the United States” and that “individuals with potential terrorism connections continue to attempt to enter the Homeland illegally between ports of entry…via the southern border.”

In recent testimony about what he regards as a rising terrorist border infiltration threat, FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that a “wide array of very dangerous threats…emanate from” the southwest border, including the designated terror group ISIS.

Despite the variably specific warnings about the border infiltration threat, the ever-growing number of known accidental-release cases such as Kharwin’s and the ones I earlier told the subcommittee about, remains broadly unrecognized as the unique emerging threat problem these cases indicate. Probably because no one has been killed yet as a consequence, few federal agencies or homeland security committee lawmakers seem interested in calling it out.

But why must blood run in the streets before something is done?

Triple Down

These cases demand a public accounting as well as a classified briefing to Congress if one hasn’t happened. Each demands a full investigation that produces not only recommendations for better counterterrorism but also consequences for those up and down the chains of command who perpetrated these failures.

If federal agencies won’t do the right thing, lawmakers in both houses of Congress should compel investigations into these accidental releases and turn up the political pressure with public hearings that force top officials to testify. They must propose legislation, send demand letters to DHS and other relevant agencies, and justifiably rant about this at their bully pulpits before it’s too late to do any of that, which it might well be.

Short of vastly reducing the millions-per-year border crossings by restoring former president Donald Trump’s discarded policies, the Biden Administration could at least be forced to triple down on its counterterrorism resources at the southern border.

Todd Bensman is Senior National Security Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and author of OVERRUN: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.

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2025 Federal Election

The Anhui Convergence: Chinese United Front Network Surfaces in Australian and Canadian Elections

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Revealing Beijing’s Transnational Influence Strategy

From Markham to Sydney: Tracing the CCP’s Overseas Influence Web

In the waning days of two federal election campaigns on opposite sides of the world, striking patterns of Chinese Communist Party election influence and political networking are surfacing—all tied to an increasingly scrutinized Chinese diaspora group with roots in the province of Anhui.

In Australia, Liberal candidate Scott Yung opened a business gala co-hosted by the Anhui Association of Sydney, a group officially designated by Beijing as an “overseas Chinese liaison station,” as reported by James King of 7NEWS. King identifies the Anhui group as part of a global network directed by Beijing’s United Front Work Department, an influence arm of the Chinese state that aims to shape foreign societies through elite capture and soft power.

King’s reporting is reigniting global concern over Chinese foreign interference, of the type previously exposed by The Bureau in Canada, which revealed that several Liberal Party of Canada officials, deeply involved in fundraising and election campaigning in the Greater Toronto Area, also serve as directors of an Anhui-based United Front “friendship” group with ties to a notorious underground casino operation.

That same group shares overlapping members and leadership with the Jiangsu Commerce Council of Canada (JCCC), a United Front-affiliated organization that controversially met with Liberal leadership candidate Mark Carney in January.

In the 7NEWS report, Yung is shown speaking—as a representative of Opposition Leader Peter Dutton—at a charity fundraiser co-hosted by the Anhui Association, a group previously celebrated by Beijing for supporting China’s territorial claims over Taiwan. According to King, the Anhui Association of Sydney was one of 14 overseas Chinese organizations designated in 2016 by the Anhui Foreign Affairs Office to serve as a liaison station advancing Beijing’s international strategy. Government documents show the group received AUD $200,000 annually, with instructions to “integrate overseas Chinese resources” into Anhui’s economic and social development.

Yung’s appearance on behalf of Liberal leader Dutton at an event ultimately backed by Beijing echoed mounting concerns surrounding Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, his opponent in Australia’s May election.

Just weeks earlier, The Australian revealed that Albanese had dined with the vice-president of a United Front group at a Labor fundraiser—prompting sharp criticism from Liberal campaign spokesperson James Paterson, the Shadow Minister for Home Affairs. Paterson said Albanese had “all sorts of serious questions” to answer, warning that “Xi Jinping has described the United Front Work Department as the Party’s magic weapon,” according to 7NEWS.

The news organization emphasized that it “does not suggest that the Anhui Association of Sydney, its former chairman, or any of its associates have committed foreign interference or otherwise acted illegally,” noting that it is legal in Australia to act on behalf of a foreign government—so long as those actions are not covert, deceptive, or threatening.

But King’s investigation underscores a broader concern—echoed in reporting from Canada and New Zealand—that Chinese diaspora organizations, operating through the CCP’s United Front system, are being strategically leveraged by Beijing’s intelligence and foreign policy arms to fund major political parties across liberal democracies, influence parliamentary policy in line with CCP objectives, and shape leadership pipelines, including the placement of favored candidates and bureaucrats into sensitive government roles.

This strategy finds a near-identical expression in Canada, where intelligence officials in Toronto have long monitored a related organization: the Hefei Friendship Association, which maintains structural ties—via Anhui province United Front entities—to the Sydney group. Founded prior to 2012 by alleged underground casino operator Wei Wei, the Hefei group is based in Markham, Ontario, and plays a central role in an ongoing CSIS investigation into foreign interference.

Documents and sources reviewed by The Bureau confirm that the Hefei Friendship Association shares leadership with the Jiangsu Commerce Council of Canada (JCCC), a group openly tied to provincial-level United Front Work Department officials in Jiangsu, the province adjacent to Anhui. In earlier reporting on the Markham illegal casino network—widely referred to as the 5 Decourcy case—The Bureau cited an investigator with direct knowledge of what intelligence sources describe as a botched national security probe. The inquiry focused on Canadian politicians attending the casino alongside Chinese community leaders affiliated with Beijing’s overseas influence operations.

One legal source close to the file summarized the issue bluntly: “The national security and intelligence apparatus of this country is ineffective and broken. I’m in disbelief at the lack of ethics and enforcement around government officials.”

According to national security sources, the 5 Decourcy mansion-casino is viewed as just one visible node in a transnational system stretching from Toronto to Vancouver—a system that includes organized crime networks, unregistered lobbying, and foreign-aligned political financing. A CSIS source confirmed that the operation—which allegedly entertained politicians—fits Beijing’s model of leveraging transnational organized crime to advance political goals abroad. That model, they noted, closely mirrors warnings from Australia’s ASIO, which has linked similar figures in the real estate sector to major donations to all three of Australia’s major political parties, including those led by Dutton and Albanese.

Further investigation by The Bureau reveals deeper overlap between the Anhui United Front networks and the Jiangsu group that met with Mark Carney in January. Among the co-directors of the Anhui United Front group—pictured in meetings and named in documents alongside Wei Wei—is a prominent Markham-area Liberal riding official, involved in fundraising for Justin Trudeau. That same individual holds a leadership role with the JCCC, which met with Carney in a meeting that was initially denied, then downplayed.

Images reviewed by The Bureau show Wei Wei seated beside a Liberal Party politician and community organizer at a private association gathering, while another Liberal official with ties to the JCCC stands behind them. A second photo, taken inside Wei Wei’s residence, shows additional Liberal figures affiliated with Anhui- and Jiangsu-linked United Front community groups.

Documents obtained by King show that the Anhui Association of Sydney was tasked to “strive to closely integrate overseas Chinese affairs with the province’s economic and social development,” according to the director of the Anhui Foreign Affairs and Overseas Chinese Affairs Office. The Bureau has reviewed similar language in Canadian documents signed by JCCC leaders, including the Hefei Friendship Association director tied to Wei Wei—reinforcing that both the Canadian and Australian networks appear to operate under direct, formal tasking from provincial CCP entities.

As these revelations now resurface in the middle of Canada’s federal election campaign, they echo with findings in New Zealand. The 2018 political implosion involving MP Jami-Lee Ross offered a cautionary tale of how foreign-aligned networks can entangle party finances, diaspora outreach, and internal leadership struggles.

Ross, once a rising star in New Zealand’s National Party, secretly recorded party leader Simon Bridges discussing a controversial $100,000 donation, which Ross alleged was tied to Chinese business interests. The scandal shattered National’s leadership and exposed vulnerabilities in its campaign finance ecosystem. In an interview with Stuff, Ross described how his relationships with Chinese community leaders, while partly grounded in legitimate social engagement, also became channels for Beijing’s political aims.

“These [Chinese] associations, which bring together the expat Chinese community, they probably do have a good social function in many regards,” Ross said. “But there’s a wider agenda. And the wider agenda is influencing political parties. And by influencing political parties, you end up influencing the government of the day. What average New Zealander out there can get the leadership of a political party to go to their home for dinner? What average person out there could just click their fingers and command 10 MPs to come to their event? Most people can’t. Money buys their influence.”

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2025 Federal Election

CHINESE ELECTION THREAT WARNING: Conservative Candidate Joe Tay Paused Public Campaign

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Sam Cooper's avatar Sam Cooper

Now, with six days until Canada’s pivotal vote—in an election likely to be decided across key Toronto battleground ridings—it appears that Tay’s ability to reach voters in person has also been downgraded.

Joseph Tay, the Conservative candidate identified by federal authorities as the target of aggressive Chinese election interference operations, paused in-person campaigning yesterday following advice from federal police, The Bureau has learned.

Two sources with awareness of the matter said the move came after the SITE Task Force—Canada’s election-threat monitor—confirmed that Tay is the subject of a highly coordinated transnational repression operation tied to the People’s Republic of China. The campaign seeks not only to discredit Tay, but to suppress the ability of Chinese Canadian voters to access his campaign messages online, via cyber operations conducted by Beijing’s internet authorities.

Now, with six days until Canada’s pivotal vote—in an election likely to be decided across key Toronto battleground ridings—it appears that Tay’s ability to reach voters in person has also been downgraded.

Tay, a journalist and pro-democracy advocate born in Hong Kong, is running for the Conservative Party in the Don Valley North riding. Federal intelligence sources have confirmed that his political activities have made him a top target for Beijing-linked online attacks and digital suppression efforts in the lead-up to next week’s federal election.

Tay’s need to suspend door-knocking yesterday in Don Valley North echoes concerns raised in a neighbouring riding during the 2021 federal campaign—where The Bureau previously uncovered allegations of Chinese government intimidation and targeting of voters and a Conservative incumbent. According to senior Conservative sources, Chinese agents attempted to intimidate voters and monitor the door-to-door campaign of then-incumbent MP Bob Saroya in Markham–Unionville.

Paul Chiang, a former police officer who unseated Saroya in 2021, stepped down as a candidate earlier this month after the RCMP confirmed it was reviewing remarks he made to Chinese-language media in January. During that event, Chiang reportedly said the election of Tay—a Canadian citizen wanted under Hong Kong’s National Security Law—to Parliament would cause “great controversy” for Canada. He then suggested, in a remark reported by a Chinese-language newspaper, that Tay could be turned over to the Toronto Chinese Consulate to claim the $180,000 bounty on his head. Chiang apologized after the comments were reported, claiming his remarks had been made in jest.

In a briefing yesterday, SITE disclosed that Tay has been the victim of similarly threatening online messaging.

One Facebook post circulated widely in Chinese-language forums declared: “Wanted for national security reasons, Joe Tay looks to run for a seat in the Canadian Parliament; a successful bid would be a disaster. Is Canada about to become a fugitive’s paradise?”

Tay, a former Hong Kong broadcaster whose independent reporting from Canada has drawn retaliation from Beijing, rejected Chiang’s apology in March, calling the remarks “the tradecraft of the Chinese Communist Party.” He added: “They are not just aimed at me; they are intended to send a chilling signal to the entire community to force compliance with Beijing’s political goals.” His concerns were echoed by NGOs and human rights organizations, which condemned Chiang’s comments as an endorsement of transnational repression.

In light of the RCMP’s reported advice to Tay this week, the challenges faced by Conservative candidates attempting to meet Chinese Canadian voters in Greater Toronto appear to reflect a broader and troubling pattern.

According to multiple senior figures from Erin O’Toole’s 2021 Conservative campaign—who spoke on condition of anonymity—O’Toole’s team was briefed by Canadian intelligence officials that Chinese government actors were surveilling then-incumbent MP Bob Saroya during the campaign. One source recalled, “There were Chinese officials following Bob Saroya around,” adding that “CSIS literally said repeatedly that this was ‘coordinated and alarming.’”

When asked to comment, O’Toole—who stepped down as leader following the Conservative’s 2021 loss—acknowledged awareness of voter intimidation reports but declined to confirm whether CSIS had briefed his team directly on the matter.

“Our candidate Bob Saroya was a hardworking MP who won against the Liberal wave in 2015,” O’Toole wrote in a statement. “He won in 2019 as well,  but thousands of votes from the Chinese Canadian community stayed home in 2021. We heard reports of intimidation of voters. We also know the Consul General from China took particular interest in the riding and made strange comments to Mr. Saroya ahead of the election. It was always in the top three of the eight or nine ridings that I believe were flipped due to foreign interference.”

SITE’s new findings on Tay’s campaign in Don Valley North reinforce those long-standing concerns. “This is not about a single post going viral,” SITE warned. “It is a series of deliberate and persistent activity across multiple platforms—a coordinated attempt to distort visibility, suppress legitimate discourse, and shape the information environment for Chinese-speaking voters in Canada.”

The Task Force said the most recent wave of coordinated online activity occurred in late March, when a Facebook post appeared denigrating Tay’s candidacy. “Posts like this one appeared en masse on March 24 and 25 and appear to be timed for the Conservative Party’s announcement that Tay would run in Don Valley North,” SITE stated in briefing materials.

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