Database: National Security Vetting Failures

Mexico-born Miguel Alejandro Santana, aka "Muhammad Khalid Mikaeel Khattab", held a lawful permanent resident green card and lived in Upland, Calif., near Los Angeles.

An application by Santana for U.S. citizenship, although its exact filing date could not be determined, likely was pending while, or fairly soon after, Santana radicalized in August 2010. That happened when Santana met Afghanistan-born naturalized U.S. citizen Sohiel Omar Kabir in a hookah bar. Kabir influenced Santana to convert to Islam and to embrace radical and violent doctrines, an FBI complaint affidavit later alleged.

The application was already pending in January 2012, when the FBI launched an investigation after receiving information entirely unrelated to the citizenship application process. However long they had between Santana’s reported radicalization in August 2010 until the FBI investigation began in January 2012, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reviewers were not the ones to discover his disqualifying activities, such as prolific online postings regaling violent jihad action and ideology on public social media.

“Since the time he converted” in August 2010, Santana physically trained, financially prepared, and recruited two other converts to travel with him to join Kabir in the Taliban and al-Qaeda so that they could kill American troops in the service of jihad, the FBI complaint stated. Kabir did enter Afghanistan in July 2012 and prepared the way for Santana and the others to follow. Long before then, Santana was prolifically posting violent extremist literature and messages on his social media.

Instead of a USCIS security screening discovery of any of this, the FBI began its investigation because of a January 2012 encounter between Santana and a customs inspections officer at the San Ysidro Port of Entry. Santana was returning from terrorism-related firearms training in Mexico, carrying al-Qaeda’s Inspire propaganda magazine. Santana told the customs officer that he had converted to Islam and downloaded the magazine to have reading material. The incident was referred to the FBI, which then mounted the terrorism investigation that involved having a paid undercover informant approach Santana online the following month to gauge whether he posed a threat.

They did after Santana told the FBI informant that he had gone to Mexico to train in firearms and had followed an article in the Inspire magazine to practice building explosives, “learning how to use and make them”. He said he planned to become a sniper for his part in the jihad.

By September 2012, plans were well underway with Kabir overseas for Santana and two other California associates to get to Afghanistan circuitously by way of Mexico. Still without citizenship that would enable him to secure an American passport, Santana renewed his Mexican passport at a Mexican consulate in the U.S. for the trip.

On November 16, as the group was driving to the Mexican border for already-purchased flights out of Mexico City, the FBI arrested them.

After a trial in March 2015, a federal judge sentenced Santana to 10 years in prison on a conviction for conspiring to provide support to foreign terrorist groups.

India-born Balwinder Singh lived in the United States (mostly in San Francisco and later in Reno, Nev.) for more than 15 years after he applied for asylum in 1997 – and received it – using a false name and date of birth to defeat the pre-9/11-era security vetting procedures.

But he also apparently defeated security vetting on a lawful permanent resident (LPR) green card application in 2010, when he should not have, many years after the 9/11 reforms that were supposed to have detected those two key frauds. Proper vetting might well then have uncovered that he actually was a leader in the India-based Sikh separatist terrorist group Babbar Khalsa International (BKI), which is on the U.S.-designated terrorist exclusion list. He also was a leader in the militant Khalistan Zindabad Force (KZF), designated by the European Union and India as a banned terrorist organization.

In about 2010, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services granted Singh an LPR green card on the basis of the same false name and date of birth Singh first provided in 1997 on his asylum application. So, too, did Singh successfully omit that, for all of the time he lived in the United States until that time, he was far more than merely a leader or affiliate member.

Four years before his LPR security screening, in 2006, Indian authorities had charged Singh in absentia for his involvement in the bombing of a bus that killed three people. Fingerprint checks with Indian authorities during the LPR screening might have found the connection.

Instead, from the continued anonymity of his San Francisco and Reno life under a false identity, he was able to actively fund, support, lead, and plot BKI and KZF terror attacks inside India for many years, according to 2013 terrorism case court documents.

BKI and the KZF had long used kidnapping, assassination, and bombings in the quest for a separate Sikh nation state in the Punjab region of India. According to the 2013 U.S. terrorism indictment, Singh came to the United States in 1997 for the express purpose of supporting the kidnapping, murder, and maiming of perceived enemies in his home country from the safety of anonymity provided by the American immigration records he secured. By 2012, BKI’s Pakistan-based leader anointed Singh leader of the United States branch of BKI, such was his commitment to the cause recognized, a federal indictment stated.

The consequence of the American failure to detect his identity fraud in 1997 and especially again in 2010 was that Singh was free to operate inside the United States on behalf of these groups and their causes, while evading arrest or detection in India. Indeed, Singh often used his American travel authorization documents to travel back and forth from India clandestinely to help plot and organize attacks with militants there, according to court records from a 2013 federal terrorism prosecution.

Far too late, an FBI investigation uncovered a plot by Singh and co-conspirators to financially support and provide weapons for violent terrorist attacks in his native country, according to a 2013 indictment. Singh did not merely help others do the killing; at one point, he arranged for the militants to provide a weapon and ammunition to him so that he could personally assassinate a certain “turncoat” during a trip to India, court records allege.

The Department of Justice eventually charged Singh for funding and preparing for an attack in India between September 2013 and December 17, 2013, along with other U.S.-based Sikh co-conspirators. Singh used his telephone to regularly communicate with militant followers in India, using code words to connote weapons, ammunition, and explosives. He sent money to the terrorist operatives and also personally traveled to India and Pakistan to plot attacks with them.

More specifically, in October 2013, Singh and his co-conspirators decided that one of them would travel to India to assassinate an Indian government official. Eventually, one of the co-conspirators attempted to board a flight to Thailand for this purpose but was arrested first. This individual was carrying two sets of night vision goggles that Singh had purchased for him at a Reno hunting store.

The FBI arrested Singh on December 18, 2013, and charged him with conspiracy to murder, kidnap, and maim persons in a foreign country, one count of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, one count of making a false statement on an immigration document, two counts of use of an immigration document procured by fraud, and one count of unlawful production of an identification document.

On November 29, 2016, Singh pleaded guilty. A judge sentenced him to 180 months in prison.

Moroccan-born El Mehdi Semlahi Fathi entered the United States on an F-1 student visa in 2007 to attend Virginia International University but failed out during the first semester and lost the visa. But Fathi would not return to Morocco as required, even after a December 2009 trespassing arrest in Fairfax, Va., led to an ICE arrest and deportation proceedings.

To avoid removal to Morocco, Fathi filed for asylum and for a request to withhold his deportation on grounds that the Moroccan government had persecuted and repeatedly arrested him while he was a university student in Casablanca protesting with an anti-government, pro-independence social movement for Western Sahara independence. An immigration judge in Connecticut freed him to file his asylum application. This 2009-2012 process opened opportunities for immigration entities to uncover that his applications were riven by fabrications. Instead, the fabrications went undiscovered for nearly two more years, which Faithi used to plot bombing attacks on federal buildings, an FBI investigation later found.

Nearly two years before a Los Angeles, Calif., immigration judge could hold a hearing on his asylum claim, Fathi was radicalized and plotting to bomb federal buildings, according to a later FBI agent complaint affidavit. An FBI investigation in the United States as well as in Morocco, which included interviews with Fathi’s parents, easily showed that he had wholly concocted all of the persecution stories to avoid deportation yet, due to failed vetting of his application, was allowed to remain inside the United States for two unnecessary years.

The security vetting process evidently failed to discern that almost every statement in his refugee application was demonstrably and knoweably untrue. Had screeners learned of at least these fabrications, the fact would have been rendered irrelevant that Fathi also was by then so radicalized that he was building bombs and plotting to use them against federal buildings – requiring an FBI counterterrorism investigation and costly prosecution.

In this case, even if robust security screening could not have uncovered indicators of Fathi’s radicalization, it may well have removed him from the country, along with what an FBI agent affidavit described as his “aspirations to conduct a bomb attack” on Harvard University in Massachusetts or a federal building in Connecticut. Instead, a federal immigration judge in Los Angeles and ICE lawyers of the Office of the Principal Legal Adviser (OPLA), who are to challenge the truthfulness of persecution claims and stories during court hearings, apparently took at face value Fathi’s claims that government persecution awaited him if deported to Morocco. The judge granted him asylum in August 2013, creating the necessity for a later laborious, expensive FBI counterterrorism investigation into information that Fathi had been planning to kill.

The government's OPLA lawyers, who typically are burdened by very heavy caseloads, could have set in motion processes that would have uncovered Fathi was deeply radicalized by the time he showed up for his immigration court hearing. But they evidently did not conduct much inquiry in advance of the case hearing that also would have uncovered his prevarications.

FBI agents much later were the ones who easily discredited all of Fathi’s claims of government persecution that supposedly awaited him, by simply comparing his earlier applications and statements on his F-1 student visa against the new asylum application. FBI agents also found fabrications by simply speaking to Fathi’s family members in Morocco and making other obvious verification inquiries that might have been done sooner and resulted in a deportation.

Instead, the FBI had to open a deep investigation that found irrefutable evidence such as Fathi’s conversations, including one in which he boasted of fabricating his asylum story after conducting research on Morocco and aligning his facts with facts in several public reports.

One recording captured him stating that “there are three things that scare people in the United States: causing harm to schools, the economy, and their sense of security.” He was recorded claiming that he had access to secret financial accounts from laundering money from drugs and talked of making pipe bombs and chemical explosives. He also was recorded saying that wires, a wire-cutter, and other materials in his apartment were components for a bomb, possibly to be delivered by a drone airplane.

The FBI arrested Fathi just weeks before the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings. Later in 2014, Fathi pleaded guilty to perjury on his asylum application.

Government prosecutors noted in a sentencing memorandum that his perjury “was only discovered because of a federal investigation that began because of Fathi’s disturbing conduct relating to his aspirational statements about engaging in bomb attacks in Massachusetts and Connecticut. In fact, the perjury charge permitted law enforcement to disrupt and prevent any possibility of a bomb attack.”

“The evidence did reveal that within [four] months of receiving his refugee [asylum] status in our country and being released from custody, Fathi … repeatedly discussed his desire to engage in a bomb attack. Because crimes against our nation’s security require prevention, once law enforcement was able to determine that Fathi had fabricated his asylum application, that criminal conduct was charged to disrupt any potential harm.”

Iraqi national Mohanad Shareef Hammadi entered the United States in July 2009 on a refugee visa he obtained as a result of his March 1, 2009, application in a refugee camp in Syria. As part of the process, he underwent security screening for past involvement in violent, anti-American jihadist groups.

But that security screening failed to uncover that Hammadi had participated in approximately 10 bombing attacks on American troops and convoys in at least two different terrorist cells in Iraq, including one for al-Qaeda, before Iraqi forces arrested him for one of the attacks. He later told undercover FBI informants that he bribed his way out of jail and fled to Syria, where he claimed to be a regular war refugee in applying for a U.S. immigration visa, court records show. Hammadi admitted at one point to being a member of the “Tandheem”, a common insider euphemism for al Qaeda in Iraq.

Instead of a refugee application denial based on discovery of all this, the USCIS green light enabled Hammadi to enter the United States and settle in Las Vegas with the help of Catholic Charities and then, on his friend Waad Ramadan Alwan’s recommendation, in Bowling Green, Ky., to work in local poultry factories. About a year later, in December 2010, Hammadi attempted to paper over his terrorist past again in an application for a green card. But by the next month, the FBI was already onto his terrorist past, and security vetting became unnecessary.

In January 2011, his friend Alwan, who was by then deeply engaged in what he believed was a weapons-supply operation to al Qaeda, recruited Hammadi and presented him to the undercover FBI informant – truthfully – as a battle-tested jihadist insurgent who was eager to continue helping the movement from the United States.

In what became known as the “Bowling Green, Ky.” terrorism plot, Hammadi and Alwan in 2011 shipped on tractor-trailer trucks what they believed were hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of weapons, such as plastic explosives, machine guns, sniper rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades to al-Qaeda, but which were in reality inert props in an expansive FBI undercover operation. At one point, Hammadi responded with enthusiasm to a suggestion that they ship surface-to-air missiles to al-Qaeda, “given that one of his terrorist cells in Iraq had acquired 11 of them” and did so on two occasions, prosecutors alleged.

Additionally, Hammadi and Alwan plotted to murder a U.S. Army captain they both knew from their time fighting in Iraq.

In January 2013, a federal judge sentenced Hammadi to life in prison on charges of conspiring to kill Americans abroad, shipping weapons to al Qaeda, and immigration fraud.

The Somalia-born Abdinassir Mohamud Ibrahim was living in a Kenyan camp in 2007 when he applied for U.S. refugee status and then entered the United States.

But in his application he made a variety of discoverable fraudulent claims to USCIS refugee visa adjudicators and, once he was living in the United States a year later, perpetuated those lies to obtain lawful permanent residence. He then committed the terrorism crimes of supporting the terrorist organization al Shabaab by recruiting for the group and, in at least one instance, sending cash to one of its operatives.

The key fraudulent claim on that initial refugee application was that Ibrahim was not born into the Haiye Habr Gedir Ayr clan and its Absiye sub-clan. Had he reported his true tribal affiliation, USCIS reviewers would have known that Ibrahim hailed from a well-known leading family whose members were leaders in violent Salifist “Islamic Courts”, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization at the time and predecessor organization of the al-Shabaab terrorist organization, the FBI much later discovered.

In claiming he was from a different clan that his own, Ibrahim covered up that close relatives included high profile Islamic Courts leaders such as Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, who maintained close ties to al-Qaeda before he was killed in battle, and also the notorious al-Shabaab leader Aden Hashi Ayrow, so dangerous that the United States killed him in a targeted 2008 airstrike. By then Ibrahim was living in the United States, an individual that homeland security analysts would have considered at risk of seeking revenge.

Had USCIS adjudicators in the Kenyan camps discovered these connections through, for instance, cursory interviews in the camps or checks with regional governments or foreign intelligence agencies, they almost certainly would have denied Ibrahim’s initial refugee classification and not let him into the United States.

Instead, he settled in the San Antonio, Texas, area in 2008 and maintained clandestine communications with terrorist associates and Islamic Courts-connected family back in the Horn of Africa. In April 2009, USCIS had a second chance to discover who Ibrahim really was when the refugee applied for lawful permanent residence. Instead, Ibrahim obtained his LPR green card despite his prevarications on official applications and ongoing relationships with terrorists back home.

From 2010 on, he actively supported al-Shabaab, helping the terrorist organization to recruit by email. He was able eventually to apply for U.S. citizenship in 2012, maintaining all of the earlier lies, but providing yet a third opportunity for immigration vetting officers to discover who he was.

It took an FBI counterterrorism investigation in 2014 to discover all of Ibrahim’s earlier disqualifying frauds. One of Ibrahim’s friends back home, an al-Shabaab operative named “Hamza”, led to the unraveling of his immigration form lies and his criminal prosecution. Ibrahim at one point transferred at least $100 to support Hamza’s terrorist activities. Federal authorities ended up prosecuting Ibrahim for supporting terrorism and also for fraud, ending any possibility that he might also have conducted physical attacks inside the United States. A federal judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

Guatemalan citizen and military officer Jorge Sosa Orantes eventually became notorious for commanding and personally participating in the 1982 massacre by his commando unit of Dos Erros villagers during his nation’s long civil war.

But SosaOrantes escaped justice for many more years than necessary due to U.S. vetting failures that granted him lawful permanent residence in 1998 and, perhaps worse, eluding ostensibly much-improved, post-9/11 security vetting processes in 2008 to obtain U.S. citizenship, court records and public information show.

Sosa Orantes had his government commando unit surround the village on a mission to arrest guerilla fighters who had earlier ambushed a military convoy, killed soldiers, and seized weapons. He and his soldiers murdered the men, then systematically raped the women and children, then smashed their skulls with sledgehammers and threw 162 of them into the town well, more than 40 percent of them children. Sosa Orantes at one point personally ordered that an infant be thrown into the village well and then dropped a hand grenade down it and fired a gun into the screaming survivors.

This war criminal’s evasion of justice outside of Guatemala began as that nation’s civil war was ending, in about 1985. Sosa Orantes deserted the military, flew to San Francisco, and applied for asylum, claiming he had fought on the other side as a guerilla and was himself persecuted by the Guatemala military, according to media reports. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services denied his asylum application for unknown reasons. But no matter. Canada granted him asylum instead and then, in 1998, he married a U.S. citizen. Through the marriage, USCIS granted him a lawful permanent residence green card that year. He moved to Riverside County, Calif., and quietly worked incognito as a karate instructor.

Years into supposed post-9/11 improvements in security vetting, in 2008 he applied for U.S. citizenship – and was approved in 2009. The USCIS citizenship vetting process did not uncover the slaughter, despite the fact that Guatemalan authorities had issued arrest warrants for Sosa Orantes and 16 of his former soldiers.

In 2009, a demand by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to prosecute the perpetrators of the Dos Erros massacre sparked a U.S. investigation that resulted in a 2010 indictment in absentia on immigration fraud charges (the U.S. had no jurisdiction over original crimes in Guatemala). Upon hearing that U.S. authorities were investigating him and had searched his home in 2010, Sosa Orantes fled to Mexico and then to Canada, court records show.

The following year, Canadian authorities arrested him in Alberta, and in 2012 extradited him to the United States to face the 2010 immigration fraud indictment. A jury convicted him at trial. A federal judge sentenced Sosa Orantes to 120 months for each of the two counts.

In February 2007, Uzbekistan national Jamshid Muhtorov, his wife, and two children somehow ended up applying for asylum after moving to Aurora, Colo. Judging from available court records, Muhtorov applied for lawful permanent residence in about 2009 or 2010 because he had it in hand when he received a truck-driving license in 2010. Within two years, the FBI arrested Muhtorov as he prepared himself for martyrdom by flying from the United States to fight with the U.S.-designated Central Asia terrorist organization Islamic Jihadist Union (IJU) against American troops in Afghanistan.

A much later FBI terrorism investigation – not any visa-related security vetting – determined that Muhtorov was already a radicalized IJU supporter before he emigrated to the United States with his family. He also held an abiding interest in terrorist group ideology, especially of the groups Hizb ut-Tahrir, Tabligh, and Akromiya, “ultimately embracing his curiosity about terrorist sects”, according to court records filed later in his terrorism prosecution.

Muhtaorov likely carried those extremist interests with him into America in 2007 and built on them in a way that USCIS security screeners might reasonably have found in a semi-thorough investigation. In December 2009, for instance, a fellow Uzek in Philadelphia invited him to stay for a period of time, found common cause supporting Uzbekistan terrorist organizations, shared extremist propaganda videos, and began to clandestinely plot to support and join the groups overseas, court records show.

Instead of being rejected for either asylum during this radicalization period with interviews or online social media investigations, or later permanent residence, Muhtorov was free to stoke his interest in martyrdom operations until February 2011, when the FBI learned that he and the friend had developed online communications with a key operative of the IRU, which is an al-Qaeda-affiliated group of mainly Uzbeks and other Central Asians. IJU was operating then under the auspices of the Taliban in Afghanistan and also in Syria. By May 2011, Muhtorov was illegally planning to travel to join IJU there and become a martyr, a terrorism crime. He told his eight-year-old daughter that he would never see her again but that, if she were a good girl, she would see him in heaven.

“Remember, I told you to pray for your Daddy to become a martyr. ... Don‘t pray, ‘Don‘t let him leave!‘ It will be a curse for me. ... Pray and say, ’make my father a martyr, one of [the] real martyrs.’”

On January 21, 2012, the FBI arrested Muhtorov at Chicago O'Hare Airport with a one-way ticket to Turkey on his way to join IJU. In June 2012, a jury found Muhtorov guilty of providing material support to IJU, in the form of himself as a fighter and several hundred dollars.

Iraqi national Ali Yousif Ahmed Al-Nouri came to the United States in 2009 after vetting as a refugee in neighboring Syria. He became a lawful permanent resident in about 2010 and, in 2015, a naturalized citizen, for a total of three security screenings. He lived in Phoenix, Ariz., and worked as a “cultural advisor” at U.S. military bases and also operated a driving school in Phoenix until his 2019 arrest.

Ten years after entering as a refugee, however, on May 12, 2019, an Iraqi judge issued an arrest warrant and extradition request for Al-Nouri on claims that he was leader of an al-Qaeda assassination cell that targeted Iraqi police officers in Fallujah, Iraq. The 2020 extradition case was still pending as of March 2023, and although Al-Nouri stated that he was innocent of the Iraqi charges and that Iraqi witnesses have given conflicting, discreditable testimony, a federal judge in Phoenix in April 2022 certified his extradition.

According to information provided by Iraq’s government, Al-Nouri’s al-Qaeda group allegedly shot and killed a first lieutenant in the Fallujah Police Directorate and a police officer on about June 1, 2006, and on October 3, 2006, respectively. On January 30, 2020, the U.S. government filed a complaint and arrested Al-Nouri on probable cause that the cultural advisor who worked with the U.S. military inside military bases inside the United States was actually an al-Qaeda assassin.

Security vetting by USCIS – at the times Al-Nouri applied for U.S. refugee status in 2009, as well as for his LPR and citizenship applications in subsequent years – apparently failed to pursue several lines of inquiry available that may have led to a denial of any one of the three immigration benefits.

Basic background investigation reasonably would have uncovered that, as U.S. prosecutors now allege in a complaint, a member of the al-Qaeda cell captured in 2006 – three years before Al-Nouri received refugee status – had identified him to Iraqi authorities as the cell’s “emir”, or leader. “Cooperator I” gave Iraqi authorities extensive details about Al-Nouri and the cell’s assassination operations. A check with Iraqi or American governments likely would have turned up this information.

Cooperator I’s 2006 intelligence information about Al-Nouri as a terrorist cell leader should have been available to USCIS adjudicators stationed in Iraq for the asking and, probably, from American military intelligence there, too, the presumption being that Iraq at the time regularly shared such terrorism intelligence with U.S. agencies.

Apparently, there was a fourth vetting opportunity, too. This one involved a security screening by the Department of Defense, a precondition for Al-Nouri to work as a "cultural adviser" on military bases, according to his defense attorney during a May 2020 detention hearing, readable in a transcript of it (page 35). Al-Nouri passed that one, too.

Among other red flags that USCIS reviewers should have seen and pursued in reviewing all three applications is that, as described in more recent court record allegations, Al-Nouri had given U.S. officials “conflicting” accounts about how he received gunshot wounds in Iraq before he fled to Syria as a refugee and also why, after he arrived in Syria, the government there imprisoned him for a time prior to his moving to the United States. It should be presumed that the American or Iraqi government had checkable derogatory intelligence information about Al-Nouri prior to his 2009 refugee status grant and, even more certainly, in the years afterward when he applied for a change in status to LPR in 2010 and, finally, citizenship in 2015.

Had adjudicators done due diligence, merely the allegations that he committed murder and ran a terrorist cell would have preempted years of Al-Nouri residing inside the United States while hiding an allegedly murderous terrorist past, not to mention that as far as adjudicators could know, he might have posed a more general threat to other Americans.

However, only as a result of the Iraqi government’s extradition request did more recent Department of Justice and federal law enforcement investigations discover the terrorism allegations.

Iraqi national Waad Ramadan Alwan, while in Syria in 2009, applied for a refugee visa and received one that year after undergoing U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services security vetting. Within two years, the FBI arrested him and fellow resettled Iraqi refugee Mohanad Shareef Hammadi for the so-called “Bowling Green, Ky.” terrorism plot to send military-grade arms, such as surface-to-air Stinger missiles, to al Qaeda in Iraq.

Alwan, it turned out, had served from at least 2003 through 2006 as a quite discoverable violent anti-American al Qaeda terrorist by the time he defeated USCIS security vetting as part of his 2009 refugee application. Only a later FBI investigation that began after Alwan resettled on that visa in Bowling Green, Ky., found his fingerprints in an American biometrics database. The prints had been entered after U.S. soldiers on September 1, 2005, dug up a roadside gravel pile south of Bayji, Iraq, and found them on a cordless phone base wired to unexploded bombs.

In 2007, Alwan’s fingerprints again were entered into a U.S. military intelligence database as he fled through a border crossing to Syria. He was fleeing after becoming a wanted man in Iraq for his insurgency activities. Once in Syria, he took on the false persona of a persecuted refugee deserving resettlement in the United States, a Directorate of National Intelligence official was quoted as saying. USCIS vetting failed to notice the fingerprints and much else. The effort also did not discover what the FBI later did, that Iraqi forces in 2006 had arrested Alwan in Kirkuk, Iraq, and obtained extensive videotaped confessions that he was an insurgent who had participated in “numerous” improvised explosive device attacks against American soldiers, according to the U.S. military. Alwan at one point during the FBI investigation boasted to an undercover operative that he had worked as a sniper in Iraq, was known as an expert bomb-builder, and that “lunch and dinner would be an American”, according to an FBI agent affidavit.

He said he worked with a cell funded by Osama bin Laden (the predecessor to ISIS) and engaged in daily attacks against American soldiers for years. He also said he remained a jihadist dedicated to holy war against the United States, which took him in, but could not return to Iraq because he was officially “wanted” there for his past violent activities. He said he remained committed to finding ways to continue his jihad from the United States.

It was not visa security vetting but an intelligence tip in September 2009 that, not long after Alwan’s arrival in Bowling Green, prompted an FBI counterterrorism investigation. In another year, a complex undercover FBI operation eventually ensnared Alwan and Hammadi in a plot to arm and equip al Qaeda. Hammadi and Alwan went on during 2011 to ship on tractor-trailer trucks what they believed were hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of weapons, such as plastic explosives, fully automatic machine guns, sniper rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades, to al Qaeda but which were in reality inert props in an expansive undercover FBI operation.

In January 2013, a federal judge sentenced Alwan to 40 years in prison for his crimes.

Afghan national and licensed physician Hayatullah Dawari first entered the United States in November 2008 and obtained a lawful permanent resident green card. He settled in Philadelphia, Pa. Dawari did not appear to have been licensed to practice medicine in the United States. Rather, he worked at 7-11 convenience stores, taught children at a local mosque, and was regarded as a deeply pious, prominent member of his community, according to letters of support from co-workers and neighbors later arguing that he be freed on bond.

But the initial 2008 security vetting for Dawari’s LPR apparently failed to discover that he omitted any reference to the fact that Russian military authorities had arrested him in the late 1980s for working with mujahideen fighters battling the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, a likely disqualifying factor for obtaining legal residence that almost certainly would have led to further investigation, which would have found that up until he immigrated to the United States and for years afterward he maintained deep, abiding, and clandestine ties to a violent Islamist extremist group in Afghanistan and Pakistan that often targeted American troops.

Only years later did an FBI and ICE Homeland Security Investigations counterterrorism investigation discover he already had “strong ties” to operatives of Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) before arriving on an immigrant visa, to the extent that he had treated their combat wounded. The HIG is a violent al-Qaeda-associated group that frequently attacked U.S. and coalition troops in Afghanistan in pursuit of overthrowing the government and replacing it with an Islamic state. The group is also active in Pakistan. The U.S. Treasury Department designated its founder, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a “global terrorist”.

A defense attorney for Dawari much later inadvertently disclosed that the doctor had treated HIG operatives prior to moving to the United States in late 2008, a fact that screeners could reasonably have uncovered by smart questioning, intelligence database checks, and interviews with those around him checking his proffered whereabouts during that period in question or the 1980s fighting with mujahideen.

Dawari’s ties to HIG in both countries were so deep and broad, the attorney said, that shortly after entering the United States in 2008 - on his LPR - Dawari even returned to the region and stayed among HIG associates for seven months before coming back to the United States. Much later, after Dawari’s August 2014 arrest for deceits related to all of this obscured personal history, U.S. prosecutors argued that his ties to his HIG network ran so deep that it would have hidden Dawari should he flee U.S. prosecution if allowed out on bond.

Security screeners for the LPR almost certainly would not have granted Dawari permission to enter had they discovered these ties and the 1980s mujahideen militia fighting in the post-9/11 context (the United States had armed and equipped the anti-Russian mujahideen, which had turned those arms on the United States well before Dawari obtained his visa). After the requisite five years more of keeping all this under wraps, in November 2013 Dawari applied for U.S. citizenship.

But security screening for the citizenship application was not what brought Dawari to FBI attention and got him convicted and ultimately deported for terrorism activity. Federal authorities said Dawari confirmed his “membership” in the HIG group during a coincidentally intercepted telephone call within weeks of submitting his 2013 citizenship application. The subsequent investigation over a period of more months uncovered the rest.

Dawari continued his relationships knowing he would draw law enforcement attention if discovered. So he communicated with HIG operatives by sending and receiving packages of books containing coded, hidden messages, sometimes about urgent unspecified actions. Federal investigators were clearly spooked by some shipments just prior to Dawari’s arrest.

Just prior to his arrest, FBI agents found in one of the shipped books two pages glued together with a note secreted inside. The note contained a coded message with directions for “urgent action” of a nature left unspecified in court records. Both shipments of books contained instructions to forward select books to other individuals including a known HIG associate in Philadelphia. A search of that person’s home found a handwritten sheet that appeared to be a cypher, containing a list of numbers and cryptic words.

In the end, security vetting for his 2013 citizenship application proved unnecessary, as by then the FBI had become aware of his HIG links and had opened a multi-faceted counterterrorism investigation. Prosecutors did charge him with lying on his citizenship application about his associations with HIG. In 2014, Dawari pleaded guilty to immigration fraud, was sentenced to two years time served and deported to Afghanistan as part of a plea deal.

Ethiopian national Mergia Negussie Habteyes entered the United States in 1999 as a refugee, having successfully covered up his direct involvement as a violent interrogator in makeshift political prisons during the 1977-1980 “Red Terror”.

In the late 1970s, a military coup led to a rise to power of military officers known as the “Derg”, after which supporting militias throughout Ethiopia were organized to violently suppress the rival Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP). The Derg militias carried out the suppression campaign by rounding up suspected EPRP members and supporters and then torturing, imprisoning, and executing many.

According to much later U.S. court records, Habteyes participated in the Red Terror as a tormentor who committed atrocities against EPRP suspects by beating them with belts, rods, and other objects, causing permanent scarring and injury.

In the pre-9/11 era when Habteyes applied for refugee status, he easily lied his way through his 1999 application and review process. Similarly, he lied his way through a 2000 application for a lawful permanent residence. But USCIS officials granted him legal residence in February 2005, well after 9/11 security screening reforms had been implemented.

Habteyes’ obfuscations proved so durable in gaming security screeners even in the post-9/11 era that USCIS once again failed to determine his true history when he applied for citizenship in 2007. After nearly a year of opportunity to investigate Habteyes and verify his proffered personal history, in September 2008, USCIS interviewed him in person, the indictment says. Immediately after perfunctory questions about whether he had ever tortured anyone or was involved in political persecution, the agency granted Habteyes citizenship.

It’s unclear how federal investigators of ICE Homeland Security Investigations came to know of his Red Terror history, but it was not as a result of the immigration application review processes of the ostensibly much-improved post-9/11 era. HSI agents arrested him on an August 2018 indictment.

In 2019, Habteyes pleaded guilty to immigration fraud, lying on forms and to officials. A judge sentenced Habteyes to 37 months in prison. The Department of Justice revoked his citizenship, as well.

El Salvador national Inocente Orlando Montano served from 1963 to 1994 in the El Salvadoran military, rising to the rank of colonel and then public safety vice minister in 1989 during the civil war, which lasted from 1980 through 1992.

In 1989, he ordered and carried out the internationally notorious murder of five Jesuit priests, as well as a local priest who was present, a housekeeper, and her 16-year-old daughter to eliminate them as witnesses to the war crime. Montano retired in 1994 and, under unclear legal circumstances, moved to the United States and began using his real name, according to court records and media reporting. His immigration status during those years is not known, although he was likely in the country illegally and worked for years in a Massachusetts candy factory.

In 2002, he applied under his real name for Temporary Protected Status, an immigration benefit that prevented deportation of illegally present Salvadorans who claimed they could not return due to natural disaster.

He did so despite the fact that, at the time, his photo and name had been posted in numerous government and public reports as the one who ordered the Jesuit priest killings - publications that were available to American adjudicators at all times. These included a 1990 report in the Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus of the U.S. Congress, and a 2004 National Catholic Reporter report, both of which included Montano's name and photographs, an ICE investigator stated in a complaint affidavit.

USCIS processors are supposed to conduct security reviews of TPS applicants looking for disqualifying criminal histories, warrants, national security threat issues and, in the case of Salvadorans at the time, whether they participated in government war crimes. But USCIS granted Montano TPS status despite the public availability of his photo and name as a suspected war criminal.

An even greater issue with TPS security screening is that USCIS approved Montano’s TPS renewal seven more times under his real name, the last time being August 2010.

The following year, a Spanish court indicted Montano and other Salvadoran military officers for the Jesuit priest murders. After being located in Everett, Mass., by the civil rights group the Center for Justice and Accountability, Montano was convicted in 2013 of immigration fraud and perjury for making false statements to immigration officials in order to stay in the United States on the TPS renewals.

He served two years in federal prison in North Carolina. In September 2020, Spain convicted him and sentenced him to 133 years in prison for the crimes.

Iraqi citizen Adil Hasan, his wife, and a brother entered the United States as refugees in 2008. They claimed persecution stories involving victimhood at the hands of al-Qaeda in Iraq and settled in the Fairfax, Va., area.

But USCIS security screeners based in Amman, Jordan, granted their provisional refugee petitions despite discoverable intelligence information that the refugee brothers were hiding knowledge that a third brother served as an operative of Iraq’s particularly murderous al-Qaeda franchise – and also that they knew he had committed international terrorism crimes.

A much later FBI investigation, in 2016, discovered that in 2004, the third brother, Majid Al Mashhadani, was working with al-Qaeda and helped his terrorist group kidnap U.S. contractor Roy Hallums, who was kept for nearly a year blindfolded in a deplorable underground torture bunker. U.S. military forces freed Hallums and other captives in a 2005 raid on the bunker and arrested Al Mashhadani at the site.

The U.S.-based FBI investigation also found a fingerprint on a document inside the bunker that belonged to the brother who came to the United States with Adil Hasan, Yousif Al-Mashhadani, an FBI complaint affidavit stated. Was Yousif an al-Qaeda operative who got into America as a refugee? Court records do not elaborate on the meaning behind the Yousif al-Mashhadani fingerprint. But whether this refugee-approved brother, Yousif Al-Mashhadani, was a terrorist operative too, the investigation also found that, at the least, he, Adil Hasan, and Adil Hasan’s wife wittingly covered up their disqualifying relationships to the kidnapper brother and then fabricated elaborate persecution stories for themselves.

They did so on at least two occasions; during the 2007-2008 USCIS security screening for the provisional refugee applications in Iraq, possibly on presumed 2008 change-of-status applications for green cards, and in 2013 in applying for citizenship.

In his first refugee application, for instance, Hasan filled out a “Worldwide Refugee Admissions Family Tree” report in which he omitted the al-Qaeda Al Mashhadani brother. Hasan also dropped his own “Al Mashhadani” family name as part of the ruse, keeping the alias permanently after they settled in Virginia.

USCIS security screeners who used the family tree report for their approval apparently missed much discoverable derogatory information at their fingertips, judging from court records. For one, a fourth brother was identified in court records only as “A.M.”. A ranking Iraqi police official who would have been listed in the family tree document, he also applied for refugee status in 2007 and in August of that year provided all of the information about the terrorist brother and fully identified all of his other brothers to USCIS adjudicators.

Information that all the brothers were biologically related, nearly a year before Hasan’s application was granted, should have been available through basic fact-finding and would have enabled adjudicators to link them all and find the fraud.

Secondly, a fingerprint check of the brother who entered as a refugee with Hasan, Yousif Al-Mashhadani, likely was never conducted as required under post-9/11 security screening reforms. Otherwise, a fingerprint database check should have discovered that this brother’s fingerprint had been collected from inside the bunker, flagged the refugee applicant as a likely terrorist operative as well, and doomed the initial early applications of all family members.

Third, the FBI in 2016 found the persecution stories Hasan-Mashhadani, his wife, and brother Yousif initially provided to USCIS adjudicators to be riddled with simple discrepancies that seemed easily discoverable. Under FBI questioning about these back-story discrepancies, all were forced to admit to making up the basic facts of their claims years after USCIS adjudicators apparently accepted them at face value.

Hasan was arrested in March 2017, after eight years of living inside the United States. He pleaded guilty to immigration fraud, was sentenced to time served and was deported.

Vallmoe Shqaire, a Palestinian with Jordanian citizenship who had been living in Los Angeles, Calif., entered the United States on a visitor's visa in 1999. It would not be discovered for nearly a decade that his real name is Mahmad hadr Mahmad Shakir and that the Israeli government had significant terrorism-related records about him. That same year, 1999, he paid $500 to a woman to marry him, a so-called "green card marriage" that didn't work out, although a second marriage attempt did. He was then able to apply for and successfully obtain lawful permanent residence and eventually obtained citizenship in 2008.

Vetting failure occurred, evidently, because USCIS officers failed to cross-check fingerprints or other biometrics with Israeli intelligence for his 2008 security vetting, which would have turned up a trove.

It wasn’t until 2013, and only because Shqaire had fallen under investigation for financial fraud, that the DOJ requested records from Israel under a mutual assistance agreement. The request yielded detailed Israeli court records and confessions as to Shqaire’s trusted role as a PLO guerilla fighter and operative during the 1980s who was convicted in 1991 of planting a bomb on a bus filled with civilians (it failed to explode). In 2010, Shqaire confessed his PLO involvement in a terrorist team known as the "Shabeda cell" and also to criminal activities to LA sheriff’s deputies investigating him for grand theft auto.

To gain visas and legal status and citizenship in the many years prior to 2013, when he came under financial fraud investigation and the Israeli records were requested, Shqaire illegally omitted the disqualifying facts of his life history and his real birth name. Shqaire's work in the Shabeda cell also required that he train with arms and explosives and that he beat Arabs suspected of collaborating with Israel.

One of those victims died of stab wounds.

A USCIS officer interviewed Shqaire, looked over his application for legal residence, then approved it the same day, court records show. For the citizenship petition, a USCIS officer interviewed Shqaire, asked him to reiterate answers to some of the questions under oath (he lied), and about a month later that, too, was approved. CNN reported that the U.S. immigration officer who handled his citizenship application said she merely relied on him to "provide complete and truthful answers" about his criminal past and associations. Only if he had told the truth about his bombing conviction would she have requested further documentation. Naturally, Shqaire did not offer that personal history.

A CNN story quoted a former U.S. immigration official involved in the vetting process in 2008 saying that a mandatory background check in place at the time should have detected the terrorism conviction, whether or not an applicant disclosed it. Left unclear was whether the check took place or, if so, was defeated by the false name. Regardless, a check of his fingerprints with the Israelis years later led to his undoing.

Iraqi citizen Enas Ibrahim entered the United States as a refugee in 2008 with her husband and his brother. They claimed elaborate persecution stories involving victimhood at the hands of al-Qaeda in Iraq and settled in the Fairfax, Va., area.

But USCIS security screeners based in Amman, Jordan, granted their provisional refugee petitions despite discoverable intelligence information from a U.S. military raid in 2005 that recovered Yousif Al-Mashhadani’s fingerprint inside an al-Qaeda bunker where kidnapped westerners were freed, including American contractor Roy Hallums, an FBI complaint affidavit much later revealed. USCIS reviewers in Jordan also missed other ties to the particularly murderous branch of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

She, her husband Adil, and brother-in-law Yousif hid the existence of a third brother tied even more directly to the raided al-Qaeda bunker. The later FBI investigation in 2016 discovered that in 2004, that brother, Majid Al-Mashhadani, was working with al-Qaeda and helped his terrorist group kidnap Hallums, who was kept for nearly a year blindfolded in a underground torture bunker. When U.S. military forces freed Hallums and other captives in the 2005 raid, they arrested this Al-Mashhadani brother at the site. That brother was imprisoned for two years in Iraq, getting out at about the time the rest of his family was applying for U.S. refugee status in 2007 in next-door Jordan.

Enas Ibrahim participated in family decisions to cover this up and to fabricate terrorist persecution stories to improve their odds of admission as refugees. (In an unrelated matter, Enas also was later found to have falsely overstated her income to qualify for a car loan in Virginia.)

Ultimately, it was the U.S.-based FBI investigation that uncovered not only Yousif’s fingerprint match to the terrorist safe house but also the fact that the third brother, Majid, had been captured in the U.S. raid at the kidnapping lair. It was also the FBI investigation, rather than any routine security screening associated with the refugee or permanent residence applications, that discovered the family’s elaborate lies about having been victimized by terrorists in Iraq.

Was Yousif an al-Qaeda operative who got into America as a refugee? Court records do not elaborate on the meaning behind the Yousif Al-Mashhadani fingerprint. But regardless of whether this refuge-granted brother was a terrorist operative, too, the investigation also found that both brothers, Yousif and Adil, as well as Enas Ibrahim, wittingly covered up their disqualifying relationships to the arrested kidnapper brother on at least two occasions.

The first was during the 2007-2008 USCIS security screening for the provisional refugee applications in Iraq. A second opportunity passed when they secured their change-of-status applications in the United States for lawful permanent residence some months later in 2008, and a third came and went in May 2013 when the trio applied for citizenship. The FBI found the Yousif fingerprint match in a separate investigation six months later, in November 2013.

The misses seemed particularly egregious in light of other information apparently at the fingertips of adjudicators. In his first refugee application, for instance, Hasan filled out a “Worldwide Refugee Admissions Family Tree” report in which he omitted the al-Qaeda Al Mashhadani brother. He also dropped his own “Al Mashhadani” family name as part of the ruse, keeping the alias permanently after they settled in Virginia.

USCIS security screeners who used the family tree report for their approval apparently missed much discoverable derogatory information at their fingertips, judging from court records. For one, a fourth brother identified in court records only as “A.M.”, a ranking Iraqi government official who would have been listed in the family tree document, also applied for refugee status in 2007 and in August of that year provided all of the information about the terrorist brother and fully identified all of his other brothers to USCIS adjudicators. Information that all the brothers were biologically related (one therefore revealed as not listed in applications), nearly a year before Hasan’s application was granted, should have been available through basic fact-finding and would have enabled adjudicators to link them all and find the omission.

Secondly, a fingerprint check of Yousif Al-Mashhadani likely was never conducted as required under post-9/11 security screening reforms. Otherwise, a fingerprint database check should have discovered his fingerprint had been collected from inside the bunker, flagged the refugee applicant as a likely terrorist operative as well, and doomed the initial applications of all of the family members.

Third, the FBI in 2016 found that the persecution stories that she and both brothers initially provided to USCIS adjudicators were riddled with simple discrepancies that seemed easily discoverable. Under FBI questioning about these back-story discrepancies, all were forced to admit to making up the basic facts of their claims years after USCIS adjudicators apparently accepted them at face value. In short, domestic criminal investigations that followed the footsteps of immigration security screening – rather than the other way around – turned up the derogatory information necessary to reveal so many deceits.

Enas was arrested in March 2017, after eight years of ineligible living inside the United States. She pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit immigration fraud, was sentenced to time served and submitted to deportation proceedings.