From Todd Bensman from the Center for Immigration Studies as posted in The Federalist

Americans deserve a full-scale investigation into what happened in Chicago and how to prevent the next open-borders-enabled attack on U.S. soil.

Surprisingly little news coverage followed America’s first terror attack by an illegal border-crossing immigrant on U.S. soil. On Saturday, 22-year-old Mauritanian Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi was found dead of an apparent hanging suicide in his Cook County, Illinois jail cell. America must learn from this to prevent the next attacks on U.S. soil by border-infiltrating jihadists.

Abdallahi illegally jumped the border from Tijuana to San Diego in March 2023 and was freed by U.S. Border Patrol. Under orders from the Biden-Harris Department of Homeland Security, Border Patrol has released millions of illegal entrants into the United States in the last four years.

On October 26, Abdallahi allegedly hunted down and shot in the back an identifiably Orthodox Jewish man walking to synagogue, then tried to up the body count by attacking responding police while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” Abdallahi still didn’t quit shooting even after police wounded him. Somehow he, the police, and the victim all survived.

This benchmarking story of America’s first terror attack by a border-crossing jihadist was largely ignored by national news media even though it came just before the brewing political war between pro-illegal immigrant Democrats and an incoming Trump administration promising an illegal immigration crackdown largely on national security grounds.

Now there will not even be a trial. Abdallahi’s sudden exit is no doubt privately regarded as a gift to pro-open borders advocates, their media sympathizers, and Democrat elected officials. But independent media and elected government must press for further details to prevent the next border-crossing terrorist attack.

What We Know So Far

At a late November arraignment reported on by a Chicago Fox News affiliate and the Chicago Sun-Times, prosecutors revealed that, while working at an Amazon warehouse, Abdallahi carefully planned his attack on Jewish targets due to jihadist ideology.

“This was not anything but a planned attack…an attempted assassination of these people,” Assistant State’s Attorney Anne McCord Rodgers told the court. “This was a calculated plan, on a public street…and attempted slaughter of that person and law enforcement officers.”

Abdallahi had mapped out the locations of two Chicago synagogues and a Jewish community, the conservative Chicago Sun-Times reported November 21. The search history also included “Jewish Community Center” and a gun store in suburban Lyons.

Once he shot the man in the back, Abdallahi displayed a relentless desire to increase his body count and seemed tactically aware of how to take out hard human targets like police officers. For example, his gun apparently jammed after shooting the Jewish victim, prosecutors said. He reportedly had the presence of mind to retreat to cover, fix the jam, then return to finish off the victim, but then retreated to cover again as first responders approached.

Abdallahi drove a few blocks around them, then returned on foot from a new direction and opened fire on four police officers and two paramedics tending the wounded man, prosecutors alleged. He then allegedly fired on the ambulance, hitting it twice as a fifth police officer returned fire.

Wounded, finally, Abdallahi fell. But he rose repeatedly to allegedly fire on the police even more before finally collapsing. Miraculously, none of his intended victims were hit.

This Case Has National Implications

The untold full story of Abdallahi’s illegal border crossing and attack in Chicago the next year, of course, goes beyond the evidence so far showing Abdallahi followed a violent ideology. Americans can no longer regard the possibility of Islamic terrorist infiltration from the southern border as merely a hypothetical bogeyman. Because of Chicago, no longer can the warnings of homeland security professionals like those quoted in my America’s Covert Border War book be dismissed as anti-immigrant fearmongering.

This terror attack and police gunbattle with an alleged border-crossing jihadist instead firmly justifies bipartisan public inquiry, public and private investigation, and analysis about border security policy that can stop future Abdallahis. After September 11, 2001, America justifiably worried about fixing the broken U.S. visa systems that 9/11 hijackers easily defrauded to enter the United States for that larger attack.

So far, the institutional media and government powers-that-be have managed to box up the Chicago incident as a mere local affair. It’s not even charged as a federal terrorism case.

Under pressure from Chicago’s Jewish community for Chicago officials to publicly acknowledge that a local Jewish man was violently attacked based on his religion, Cook County’s far-left, George Soros-backed State’s Attorney Kim Foxx (who leaves office next year) eventually charged Abdallahi with terrorism, under Illinois’ circa-9/11 terrorism statute.

This case demands intense national attention. Chicago’s attack is an uncontestable confirmation of the terrorism threat inherent in open borders policies. President Donald Trump promised throughout his campaign to reverse Democrats’ open border, catch-and-release policies. Yet open-borders advocates are organizing to wage political, information, and legal warfare to defeat Trump’s enforcement of U.S. immigration laws. Front-and-center attention on the Chicago terrorist attack would provide Americans the context they deserve during the melee over Trump’s planned illegal immigration fixes.

If the Chicago terror attack is allowed to fade away after Abdallahi’s burial, Americans will have been robbed of their ability to loudly petition for protection from the next such terror attack. The next attack could easily target the towns now vowing to “Trump-proof” themselves against policies that would deport other Abdallahis before they also can attack.

Questions Americans Deserve Answered

Failing to investigate this incident will likely leave the doors open to more such attacks. So far, there’s been no public sign of FBI or Department of Justice involvement in the Chicago case, as would be ordinary when Islamic terrorism is indicated in any attack on U.S. soil.

Ceding this case entirely to state and local authorities with less counterterrorism training and intelligence resources leaves too much on the table. For example: are co-conspirators or sympathizers who urged Abdallahi on still out there? Did foreign terrorism masters direct Abdallahi? Chicago police may be well-meaning and reasonably resourced, but counterterrorism is the FBI’s unique province.

If the bureau is not involved, why not? If it is, good, but to what extent did the FBI follow leads and intelligence and provide the results to Chicago PD (which may not hold the security clearances to ingest such information)? Might Chicago, a sanctuary city, even have refused to collaborate with the FBI for partisan reasons during a hotly contested presidential campaign?

Abdallahi reportedly did not flag on any terrorism or criminal databases when Border Patrol detained him in San Diego Sector. Was he ever detained and referred to the Border Patrol’s Tactical Terrorism Response Team or Immigration and Customs Enforcement intelligence officers for extended terrorism-related interviews? That is supposed to happen with “special interest aliens,” who get assigned that tag if they hail from designated countries of terrorism concern like Mauritania.

According to material obtained by the Center for Immigration Studies through a Freedom of Information Act request, Border Patrol apprehended 18,260 Mauritanians illegally crossing the U.S. southern border from 2021 through December 2023. ISIS, al-Qaeda, al-Mourabitoun, and other violent Islamist groups operate throughout the Sahel region of northwest Africa, which includes Mauritania, according to many credible sources about international terrorism.

Face-to-face interviews with Mauritanians and all other special interest aliens can be the difference between deporting a dangerous terrorist or letting one into the country. Have those happened with those 18,260 Mauritanians admitted to the U.S. in just three years? Will they?

Abdallahi is dead. But his case presents a rare opportunity for the traditional bastions of government accountability to get interested and get to work with this last question in mind: Is a Jewish Chicagoan the first American to be shot by a border-crossing jihadi, or the last?

From The Center Square

By Bethany Blankley

Attorney General Ken Paxton also said the ruling was a “huge win for Texas…. We sued immediately when the federal government was observed destroying fences to let illegal aliens enter, and we’ve fought every step of the way for Texas sovereignty and security.”

A panel of three judges on the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Texas in a lawsuit filed over its concertina wire barriers.

The court ruled 2-1 in a case that may set the tone for two other cases before the court related to Texas’ border security operations.

Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan wrote for the majority, with Judge Don Willett joining him. Judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez dissented, arguing Texas did not meet “its burden to show a waiver of sovereign immunity or a likelihood of success on the merits.”

The ruling was issued 13 months after Texas sued the Biden administration after it destroyed concertina wire barriers it erected on state land.

The court was asked to decide whether Border Patrol agents can legally cut concertina wire fencing erected by Texas law enforcement along its border with Mexico. The Biden administration ordered Gov. Greg Abbott to remove it, arguing he was interfering with federal immigration operations. Abbott refused, arguing that the administration was facilitating illegal entry and violating federal law. In response, the administration ordered Border Patrol agents to use a bulldozer and remove wire fencing. Abbott sued, arguing they were destroying Texas property and Texas has the legal authority to erect barriers on state land.

Texas requested the district court to issue an injunction to block Border Patrol agents from removing the fencing, which it denied despite agreeing with Texas’ arguments.

The court “agreed with Texas on the facts: not only was Border Patrol unhampered by the wire, but its agents had breached the wire numerous times ‘for no apparent purpose other than to allow migrants easier entrance further inland,’” the Fifth Circuit’s 75-page ruling states. However, it denied Texas’ request arguing the federal government had sovereign immunity.

Texas next appealed to the Fifth Circuit, which granted the injunction pending appeal. The Biden administration appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which vacated the injunction without any stated reason.

The Supreme Court’s ruling didn’t deter Texas, which continued building and erecting concertina wire in the Eagle Pass area, and later established the military base for Texas’ border security mission, Operation Lone Star, there. OLS officers also expanded concertina wire barriers in other key areas along its border.

“The Texas National Guard continues to hold the line in Eagle Pass,” Abbott said at the time. “Texas will not back down from our efforts to secure the border in Biden’s absence.”

The three-judge panel ruled that Texas “is entitled to a preliminary injunction.” The ruling states that the Biden administration “clearly waived sovereign immunity as to Texas’s state law claims under § 702 of the Administrative Procedure Act,” which it says “is supported by a flood of uncontradicted circuit precedent to which the United States has no answer.”

The Fifth Circuit also rejected other Biden administration arguments, including that Texas was erecting barriers to safeguard its own property, not to “regulate Border Patrol.”

The ruling reversed the district court’s judgment and granted Texas’ preliminary injunction. The court also prohibited the federal government from “damaging, destroying, or otherwise interfering with Texas’s c-wire fence in the vicinity of Eagle Pass,” including Shelby Park, which Abbott shut down after learning that the Biden administration was using it as a staging ground to facilitate illegal entry into the US.

Abbott lauded the Fifth Circuit ruling, saying, “The federal court of appeals just ruled that Texas has the right to build the razor wire border wall that we have constructed to deny illegal entry into our state and that Biden was wrong to cut our razor wire. We continue adding more razor wire border barrier.”

Attorney General Ken Paxton also said the ruling was a “huge win for Texas.”

“The Biden Administration has been enjoined from damaging, destroying, or otherwise interfering with Texas’s border fencing. We sued immediately when the federal government was observed destroying fences to let illegal aliens enter, and we’ve fought every step of the way for Texas sovereignty and security.”

With weeks left in the administration, the concertina wire barrier case is unlikely to be appealed for a full court review.

In May, the court is scheduled to hear arguments on a lawsuit related to Texas’ marine barriers in the Rio Grande River, unless the case is dropped by the incoming Trump administration. Another case before the court is over Texas’ border security law, SB 4.