Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez
A June 18 DHS press release, “Alleged Ringleader of UFC Terrorist Plot is a Mexican Illegal Alien”, reports that Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez (the alien in question), was arrested in Nebraska for his role in a purported plot “to carry out a mass-casualty attack against government officials and other attendees” during an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event at the White House on Sunday. Subsequent reports claim Alvarez, 31, entered on a tourist visa with his family in 2001, but received quasi-status under the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Apparently, not all “DACAs” are honors students — at least not if the government’s allegations are true.
DACA
For more than two decades, congressmen from both sides have tried to pass some form of “DREAM Act”, that is, an amnesty for aliens living in the United States illegally after arriving here — with and without their parents — as children.
And for nearly a quarter century, they’ve been unsuccessful, and regardless of how it turns out, this case is unlikely to further their cause.
The failure of DREAM Act legislation led the Obama administration to create DACA, which provides quasi-legal status to aliens who entered the United States while under the age of 16 before June 15, 2007, who were born after June 15, 1981, who meet certain educational standards, and who have not been convicted of certain crimes.
DACA was not created by Congress, or even by executive order or executive action, for that matter. Instead, it’s the product of a memo issued by then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano on June 15, 2012 (five months before that year’s presidential elections), that has become a political football ever since.
As its name suggests, DACA is a unique flavor of “deferred action”, an “inherently discretionary” exercise of “prosecutorial discretion” to which applicants have “no legal right”, though aliens granted deferred action don’t accrue periods of unlawful presence in the United States while in that status and are eligible to apply for employment authorization.
ICE is quick to add that “deferred action does not confer lawful immigration status upon an individual”, meaning that an alien granted DACA exists in a nether zone between legal and not.
As of December, nearly a half-million aliens were active recipients of DACA, down from more than 535,000 at the end of June 2024, as some have left, died, or gained actual lawful status.
Generally, DHS won’t place an individual who has been granted DACA into removal proceedings unless and until the department terminates the alien’s DACA status or until DACA itself ends. That said, all deferred action determinations are discretionary, and so the decision to place a given alien into removal proceedings is made on a “case-by-case” basis.
The Alleged Plan Attack on the White House
According to a June 16 Department of Justice press release on the case (“Five men arrested & charged in plot to attack & kill government officials, others attending Ultimate Fighting Championship at White House”), the FBI became aware of a possible threat on the UFC event at the White House nearly a week earlier, on June 10.
The complaint in Alvarez’s case claims that local police in Knox County, Ohio, were called to a disturbance at a house that day, which had been phoned in by the mother of Tycen Proper, a 19-year-old and one of the purported would-be participants in the plot.
That charging document contends that Proper’s father told the cops his son “had recently met random people online and had been planning ‘recons’ with these individuals” and had also planned to rendezvous with them on the weekend of June 13.
The father also supposedly told police that his son “also recently acquired camping gear, food, ballistic plates, a new shotgun, a rifle, ‘lots’ of ammunition, extra magazines, and plate carriers”, which he had purchased with $3,000 in “graduation money”, all of which they turned over to the authorities.
When the FBI spoke to Proper’s mother the next day, again as per the complaint, she told an agent that her son “had recently begun interacting with a group online that was comprised of individuals who claimed to be ex-military and Christian-based” and who’d “expressed ultra-religious and antigovernment sentiments, specifically citing grievances about government corruption, the handling of the Epstein files, data centers taking up all the water in communities, and other government actions”.
During his own interview with investigators, the complaint contends, Proper “allegedly said he had planned with others a coordinated attack against the U.S. government during the UFC event at the White House”, and that “members of the group who would participate in the attack began communicating with one another in or around March”, with “some of the more serious members of the group” eventually moving their discussions “over to the encrypted communications app Signal”.
According to the June 16 DOJ press release, Proper further explained to authorities that the group had “planned to fly small drones with explosives to detonate over the north side of the UFC arena, forcing high value targets to evacuate the premises; the group would then act as snipers and shoot these individuals”.
“Shepherd”
Paragraph 22 of the complaint alleges as follows:
During PROPER’s June 11 interview, he stated that he originally learned of an anti-government protest in Washington, DC after it was advertised on TikTok by a user identified as Shepherd. He further detailed Shepherd directed the actions that would take place during the event and that Shepherd was the primary individual involved with planning. PROPER directly stated that Shepherd was the leader of the group and described him as aggressive in tactical planning. He believed Shepherd was approximately 30 years old and possibly prior military. Finally, PROPER also indicated that Shepherd was the one who created the group’s tier systems.
The complaint asserts the FBI has probable cause to believe “Shepherd” is Alvarez, based on a TikTok address (“@unitedworldwide444”) and some additional searches detailed at length therein, and he was arrested by authorities on June 14.
“This Illegal Alien from Mexico Should Never Have Been Allowed in Our Country”
Lauren Bis, DHS acting assistant secretary for media relations, had the following to say about Alvarez and his alleged involvement in this purported plot:
This illegal alien from Mexico should never have been allowed in our country. He was the ringleader of a failed terror attack targeting UFC Freedom 250 at the White House. ... He and his co-conspirators now face charges of conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to commit violence on White House grounds. He will face justice and swiftly be removed from our country.
Given that Alvarez was about six years old when he came to this country in 2001 on a B-2 tourist visa (likely with family), I wouldn’t go so far as to state that he “should never have been allowed” into this country, but (assuming the reporting is true), the fact he never left suggests that whoever brought him didn’t have the appropriate “nonimmigrant” intent, i.e., the intent to return home.
Any subsequent deportation of Alvarez and his family would not have been “punishment”, but rather the legal consequence for failing to comply with the terms of their nonimmigrant entries. Or, as the Supreme Court explained 130 years ago:
The order of deportation is not a punishment for crime. It is not a 'banishment,' in the sense in which that word is often applied to the expulsion of a citizen from his country by way of punishment. It is but a method of enforcing the return to his own country of an alien who has not complied with the conditions upon the performance of which the government of the nation, acting within its constitutional authority and through the proper departments, has determined that his continuing to reside here shall depend.
And when nonimmigrants — and B-2 tourists in particular — fail to depart as promised, it makes it more difficult their fellow countrymen to come here temporarily, but legally, in the future. Let me explain.
Section 214 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) governs the issuance of nonimmigrant visas at consular offices abroad, and subsection (b) therein states that an applicant for such a visa is “presumed to be an immigrant” — that is presumed to be coming here permanently, not temporarily — “until he establishes to the satisfaction of the consular officer ... that he is entitled to a nonimmigrant status”.
That “214(b)” ineligibility is the most common ground on which consular officers deny nonimmigrant visas, and when nationals of a specific country have high nonimmigrant “overstay” rates, consulates tighten up their nonimmigrant-visa issuances.
While I haven’t handled an immigration case in over a decade, I remain an attorney in good standing and receive calls from U.S. citizens and green card holders who are attempting, unsuccessfully, to secure tourist visas for their parents and other loved ones to come to this country for a visit.
It breaks my heart, but there is usually nothing I can do. “Once bitten, twice shy” doesn’t just apply to unfamiliar canines. Untruthful and noncompliant nonimmigrant visitors ruin others’ hopes, plans, and reunions.
The Controversy
Finally, it’s important to remember that DACA was born in controversy.
In 2010, during his first term and with midterm elections looming, Obama was pressed by immigrant advocates to use his executive authority to allow aliens unlawfully present to remain, but the president pushed back, explaining:
I am president, I am not king. I can’t do these things just by myself. We have a system of government that requires the Congress to work with the executive branch to make it happen. I’m committed to making it happen, but I’ve gotta have some partners to do it.
But less than two years later, with the 2012 presidential election on the horizon, Obama directed Napolitano to do exactly what he had claimed he couldn’t do and authorize quasi-legal deferred action status for “DREAMers”.
Even Obama-friendly media outlets like the Washington Post and FactCheck.org pushed back after the president proposed extending deferred action to parents of U.S.-citizen and green-card holding children (“Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents”, better known as “DAPA”), but he did so anyway, only to be stopped in the courts.
Personally, I think that Obama did DREAMers more harm than good, because DACA has taken pressure off Congress to act. DACAs are now proxies for DREAMers, and so long as the program continues, even as its beneficiaries approach middle age, the legislative branch will be in no hurry to take what would be a contentious amnesty vote.
Not All Honors Students?
Unlike DAPA, DACA has rolled on, a veritable zombie program that has nonetheless survived repeated efforts to end it, with supporters boasting of the benefits DACA recipients provide the U.S. economy and highlighting cases of DACA recipients who graduated Harvard Law School, won prestigious Rhodes Scholarships, or more prosaically became valedictorians at their high schools.
Unless and until he’s convicted, the government’s claims that DACA recipient Abraham Alvarez masterminded an attack on the White House during an event celebrating the country’s 250th birthday are just allegations, and he’s entitled to a presumption of innocence. But if the government’s charges are proven, his case will show that not all “DACAs” are honors students — or “good Americans” in all but status.