illegal immigration
House Committee Demands Answer on Eight Tajik Border Crossers Arrested for Terror Plot
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).
illegal immigration
Terror Attack in Chicago? Illegal Immigrant Charged for Shooting Jewish Man
From the Center for Immigration Studies
By Todd Bensman
The New York Post and Fox News are reporting that Abdallahi crossed the U.S. Southwest border in March 2023, that San Diego-area Border Patrol under Washington, D.C., orders waved him in just like millions of other strangers, and that he should never have been in the country to shoot at Americans in the first place.
In a shooting that bears the hallmarks of a terror attack, 22-year-old Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi of Mauritania stands charged with opening fire on an identifiably orthodox Jewish man walking to synagogue in Chicago, severely wounding him while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” before engaging police in an extended gun-battle that landed the West African in a hospital facing a long prison term. The victim survived the attack.
For days afterward, a downplaying Chicago media could not bring itself to report Abdallahi’s immigration status as the national presidential election campaign debate was reaching its fevered apogee, centered on the public safety consequences of the historic mass migration border crisis in flooded American cities like Chicago.
But now, the New York Post and Fox News are reporting that Abdallahi crossed the U.S. Southwest border in March 2023, that San Diego-area Border Patrol under Washington, D.C., orders waved him in just like millions of other strangers, and that he should never have been in the country to shoot at Americans in the first place.
Jewish leaders in Chicago expressed outrage that Cook County’s progressive George Soros-backed State‘s Attorney Kim Foxx (who leaves office next year) has not charged Abdallahi yet with a state hate crime, albeit police had not been able to interview the alleged shooter as of this week — and determine a chargeable motive — because of his wounds.
But Chicago’s Jewish community, U.S. lawmakers with national security oversight authorities, the Donald Trump and Kamala Harris campaigns, and all the national media could be asking far more consequential questions that are essential to serve broader U.S. national interests.
Far More Important Questions
While it may be too early to determine whether this qualifies as an act of terrorism in violation of federal terrorism laws, is the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force even investigating the prospect that co-conspirators are still out there plotting next moves, that foreign actors back in Mauritania directed Abdallahi, and if federal terrorism charges are in the offing?
Local hate crime charges aside for just a minute, is President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice investigating anything at all about Abdallahi’s alleged shooting attack?
If the answer to these questions is a universal “no”, and the FBI is not all over one or more of these issues, lawmakers and the media are obliged to demand an answer from FBI Director Christopher Wray to this question: Why not?
If the answer is “yes”, then, whew — and great. But that’s just for starters.
National Security Vetting Failure and Just Pure Luck at the Land Borders
Congress, reporters, Jewish communities, and all Americans deserve to know exactly how the Border Patrol handled Abdallahi after his March 2023 illegal entry into California, starting with a timeline of how and when agents ran his name and biometrics through national security databases. These are questions for President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as for DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas or the leaders of the U.S. Border Patrol.
Reportedly, Abdallahi did not hit on any terrorism or criminal databases when Border Patrol detained him in San Diego Sector.
But was he ever detained and referred to the Border Patrol’s Tactical Terrorism Response Team or ICE intelligence officers for extended terrorism-related interviews? That’s what is supposed to happen with “special interest aliens”, who get assigned that tag if they hail from designated countries of terrorism concern like Mauritania. It’s doubtful that any interview was conducted, given the historic volumes of special interest aliens coming in from around the world during the Biden border crisis, Mauritanians among them in historically high volumes.
We must ask because high risk is suggested by Border Patrol encounters with a national record-breaking 400 border-crossers who hit on the FBI’s terrorism watch list in the more than three years of the Biden mass migration crisis, and that, while it’s good they were noticed and caught, far too many got accidentally released into America during the crush of humanity the administration’s policies caused.
One was an illegal border crosser from Senegal, in Abdallahi’s terrorist-inhabited neck of the woods, arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs in New York on a warrant from back home for “terroristic activities”.
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 southern border from 2021 through December 2023.
ISIS, al-Qaeda, al-Murabitoun, and other violent Islamic extremist groups operate throughout the Sahel region of northwest Africa, which includes Mauritania, according to many credible sources about international terrorism. In May 2023, four jihadists convicted of terrorism crimes escaped during a deadly prison break there.
Any abdication from past duty to conduct face-to-face interviews with Mauritanians occurs as the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. intelligence community began publicly warning, in both the 2024 and 2025 public Homeland Threat Assessments, of a heightened threat of border-crossing terrorism.
“Individuals with terrorism connections are interested in using established travel routes and perceived permissive environments to facilitate their access to the United States,” the DHS assessment for 2025, released on October 2, re-states. “Over the next year, we expect some individuals with terrorism ties … will continue their efforts to exploit migration flows and the complex border security environment to enter the United States.”
The First American Whose Luck Ran Out?
Americans have gotten lucky so far.
We know that earlier this year, the FBI rolled up eight Tajikistani border-crossers in a vast, multi-state counter-terrorism wiretap investigation that featured bomb-making talk but was pushed out of the news by choices to deport them rather than charge them with terrorism crimes that would have led to very public — and politically damaging to Democrats — court proceedings during the presidential campaign featuring criticism of the border crisis. In September, Canadian and U.S. counterterrorism agencies intercepted a Pakistani immigrant let into Canada as he attempted to cross south into New York with co-conspirators planning to massacre Jews at synagogue during the 2024 High Holy Days services.
In June 2024, a federal court prosecution in Sacramento convicted a Russian national from the Caucuses region of terrorism charges a few years after his illegal U.S.-Mexico border crossing. Mura Kurashev sent money to terrorists in Syria to buy battle motorcycles and guns, but the investigating FBI agent said he’d probably have conducted an attack inside the United States himself had he not been arrested in 2021.
In February 2024, the DOJ convicted an Iraqi asylum seeker of plotting to bring in over the southern border a team of assassins to murder former President George W. Bush.
This case in Chicago presents a special occasion that demands action from U.S. bastions of government accountability in national security matters who should get to work with this last question in mind:
Is the Jewish Chicago victim the first American whose luck finally ran out?
Great Reset
A One-Stop Shop for Illegal Migration Reveals Ongoing Plans for Illegal Immigration
From the Center for Immigration Studies
By Todd Bensman
UN/NGO ‘mall’ under construction in southern Mexico shows they expect continued illegal flow to the U.S.
A 75,000-square-foot mega-mall, built to enable industrial-scale illegal immigration to the U.S. southern border, is almost online here in this key entry city in southern Mexico just across the border from Guatemala.
Scheduled to open in December, the mall suggests that powerful global agencies, the United Nations key among them, are bullish on a long-term future of continued heavy U.S.-bound illegal migrant traffic through Mexico – no matter the outcome of the November 5 American presidential election.
Those bullish investors are the dozens of migration-oriented UN agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have already plowed hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money into constructing a permanent network of way stations for thousands of miles along the migration routes from South America to the U.S. border during the four years of the Biden-Harris administration.
The record hundreds of millions of dollars in aid is distributed at the way station network in the form of cash cards, cash in envelopes, food, vouchers for onward travel and lodging, medical treatment, pharmaceuticals, legal counseling, and much more. (See: “UN Budgets Millions for U.S.-Bound Migrants in 2024”.) This aid has without doubt helped the UN and its growing constellation of NGOs keep the masses moving north through Tapachula in record numbers toward irresistible Biden border policies that have welcomed across arrivals in historic millions. (See: “Biden Admin. Sends Millions to Religious Nonprofits Facilitating Mass Illegal Migration”.)
The UN and NGOs are betting on a busy future in Mexico. Going forward, the purpose of this one strategically located facility is to “respond comprehensively to the needs of people who arrive in Mexico … migrant refugees who travel together from all continents, and arrive in Tapachula in need of a response or attention”, Giovanni Lepri, the Mexico representative for the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), told reporters when Mexico’s foreign ministry announced it in April 2024.
But the Tapachula mall represents a far more expansive billion-dollar migration-route safety net constructed during the Biden-Harris years using record-breaking U.S. taxpayer contributions.
It plugs into two other big one-stop-migration malls erected in the northern Mexico cities of Monterrey and Tijuana. These gleaming new Mexican facilities, and plenty of other UN and NGO substations in Mexican towns and cities, form the final terminus of the trails to the United States lined with pots of U.S. taxpayer money. And they are representative of what’s happening throughout Latin America.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which received $1.9 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds in 2024 and $2.1 billion in 2023 (compared to $377 million in 2019) for migration assistance throughout Latin America, started building the Tapachula facility on land donated by Chiapas State as part of the deal with Mexico to run it.
The UNHCR, UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), UNICEF, and dozens of private, often religion-based, NGOs scattered around Tapachula will work alongside one another under one massive roof here — evidently planning a years-long collaboration.
None of the UN/NGO pots of gold are exactly a secret but are relatively hard to find for the uninitiated. And harder to grasp as connected to domestic American policies or as a legitimate point of political debate.
The UN’s 2024 update to the “Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan” (RMRP for short), a UNHCR and IOM planning and budget document, lays out in detail that it planned to hand out nearly $1.6 billion in 17 Latin America countries using its network of 248 different NGOs. (For the complete list of involved groups, see p. 268, here, and explore their activities further with this interactive tool).
That was on top of the 2023-2024 RMRP plan, which called for 228 NGOs (all listed on p. 268 of the list of involved groups) to spend $1.72 billion on trailside assistance to mass migration that all know will illegally pass through many countries and, finally, breach the U.S. border.
Hundreds of millions of dollars for all of this comes straight from U.S. taxpayers in the form of sharply increased US State Department bequeathals, USAID grants, and flexible spending contributions to the UNHCR and IOM.
Too Far for Average Americans to See
For an idea of how U.S. tax money is spent to flood the American border, the far northwest Colombian town of Necocli provides a window. This is a major staging town for migrants preparing to boat across the Gulf of Uraba for smuggler-guided backpack trips through the so-called “Darien Gap” jungle passage that leads into Panama and eventually Mexico.
In Necocli, the UN and NGO agencies have arrayed themselves in something like an outdoor swap meet of NGO booths and an IOM mobile bus office on a few acres next to the gulf beach, the Center for Immigration Studies observed during an August 2024 research trip to the region. The Jewish NGO Cadena was set up in a booth next to the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA).
NGO and UN workers there said they provide a variety of trail advice — and plenty of supplies to the immigrants, to include socks, underwear, backpacks, bug repellant, water filters, sunscreen, and Vaseline.
And food.
“Like things easy to carry so they can eat and be done with it,” a Cadena worker said.
ADRA provides children’s classes thrice weekly on how to avoid sexual predators among the strange men traveling the Darien Gap.
On this day, a Cadena worker said she’d given out thousands of food items such as packaged soup to more than 3,000 migrants during the previous few months, showing the last of it: a box with a handful of granola bars she hoped to hand out soon so she could go home.
What about critics who say NGOs like Cadena are helping migrants break the laws of many countries?
“As an organization,” the Cadena worker responded. “We’re not here to judge. We’re just here to provide a service.”
”But aren’t you helping them migrate?”
“Only by giving them the things that I mentioned, not money or fare, just certain resources for the trip,” she explained.
UNHCR workers carrying iPads interacted with groups of migrants sitting in chairs under open-air shelters, surveying them and their needs for the trail ahead. The IOM workers hand out hygiene kits to women, but had run out of the kits some days earlier.
Across the Uraba Gulf in the staging town of Acandi, the Clan del Gulfo paramilitary controls the human smuggling operations into the Darien Gap. The cartel runs two migrant camps where the migrants are brought for final journey preparations.
The center gained permission to access one of the camps, “Camp 1”. Inside, the Center found NGOs providing medical services, legal counseling, and food.
Furthermore, Colombian banks also have been allowed to set up a money-wiring service so that migrants could pay their foot guides.
All involved could not possibly be unaware that the people they are assisting intend to break the immigration laws of a half dozen countries up trail, including, ultimately, illegally breaching the American border.
A Bright Future for Mass Migration?
The UN and NGO’s migration advocacy industrial complex is now preparing its 2025-2026 plan for the trails of Latin America.
A request for input from its NGO partners suggests an ambitious coming year of providing “cash and voucher assistance”, “food security”, “humanitarian transportation”, “shelter”, and most other basic human needs.
Who will be the recipients?
Refugees and migrants in-transit (of all nationalities) who cross an international border.
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