On October 31, my colleague Todd Bensman discussed the case of Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi, an alleged Mauritanian national apprehended after entering illegally and released into the United States, who was suspected in the shooting of “an identifiably orthodox Jewish man walking to synagogue in Chicago” while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” Bensman’s piece was headlined “Terror Attack in Chicago?”, but you can remove the question mark: Abdallahi’s now been charged under state terrorism and hate crime statutes in Illinois. Bensman and others warned that the open Southwest border was vulnerable to terrorist incursions, but few in the administration listened even though there were “blinking lights everywhere”. He was correct, but I trust he wished he wasn’t.
"Mohamed Abdallahi Was Encountered by U.S. Border Patrol”. After Bensman’s piece appeared, Newsweek reported that ICE admitted that “Abdallahi was encountered by U.S. Border Patrol on March 31, 2023, near San Ysidro, California”, confirming an earlier Fox News claim that he had been apprehended at the border and subsequently released into the United States.
Abdallahi was apparently issued a Notice to Appear (“NTA”, the charging document placing aliens into removal proceedings), and released on his own recognizance.
None of that makes sense from a legal standpoint, but makes too much sense given the administration’s long-standing border policies.
As I have explained multiple times in the past, Congress mandates that every illegal entrant be detained, from the moment of encounter until the alien is either granted asylum or removed.
The Biden-Harris administration, however, has opted to ignore that rule and, while one federal judge has curbed border releases on parole, he didn’t prevent DHS from simply cutting illegal migrants loose into the country (though he made clear the department lacks the authority to do so).
Even presuming for the sake of argument that DHS has inherent authority to ignore federal statutes and release border migrants under its general arrest and release authority, however, such releases are still subject to decades-old standards.
Under those standards, nobody — not immigration judges, ICE officers, or Border Patrol agents — can release aliens pending removal proceedings unless those aliens prove they aren’t flight risks or threats to national security, and that they don’t pose a danger to the community.
By definition, with only limited exceptions, every illegal migrant is a flight risk. That’s because their very first act in this country was the crime of “improper entry”, a misdemeanor for the first offense and a felony for subsequent ones. If aliens are “just” a flight risk and not a threat, CBP must require them to post a bond to ensure their appearance in court and for removal, but that didn’t happen in this case.
Threat to National Security and Danger to the Community. The more important factors in that release calculus, of course, are the potential threats those migrants pose to national security and the community.
Before foreign nationals are lawfully admitted to the United States, they must first prove “clearly and beyond a doubt” that they are “entitled to be admitted”, which among other things means they must prove they aren’t criminals and don’t pose a terrorist risk.
That burden on the alien is set forth in statute for a reason — criminals and terrorists have exploited our generous immigration laws in the past to prey on and harm the American people. There’s a reason that the agency charged with enforcing these laws is called the “Department of Homeland Security”.
Someone, somewhere, in either the White House or DHS has concluded, however, that protecting the American homeland isn’t as important as considering the “best interests” of aliens who have entered the United States illegally — and as proof look no further than the charges in this case.
Who Is The Suspect, Really? Abdallahi, like any criminal defendant, is entitled to a presumption of innocence, but let’s assume that everything the Chicago cops and Illinois prosecutors say about his case is true, and that the reports from Newsweek, Fox News, and multiple other outlets about his entry and release are accurate as well.
He’s identified as “Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi”, a 22-year-old national of Mauritania, but how does anybody in the U.S. government know that any of those facts are true?
It’s not uncommon for nationals of other West African countries to claim to be Mauritanians when seeking asylum here, the most notable being a migrant named “Amadou Diallo”.
As my colleague Jan Ting explained to Congress in 2014:
Back in 1999 [] Diallo died in New York City as the result of police gunfire, and was discovered to have made numerous false claims to gain asylum in the U.S. Amadou Diallo had claimed to be an orphan whose parents were murdered, though his parents showed up at his funeral, and he claimed to be Mauritanian, though he was actually from Mali.
Non-Mauritanians (and Malians in particular) nonetheless claim to be from Mauritania because it has a well-documented history of racial tension and discrimination, with Beydane and Haratine Moors (who identify as Arabs) on one side and “sub-Saharan non-Arab minorities” on the other.
Even those lines aren’t so clearly cut, given that Beydanes used to enslave the Haratines (slavery wasn’t ended in the country until 1981, and wasn’t criminalized until 2007), but in any event the latter group still holds much more political and economic power in Mauritania than any of the other ones. Official abuses, therefore, usually satisfy the asylum standard for persecution on account of race.
In other words, if you were looking for a country from which to seek asylum, Mauritania would be up there with North Korea among your top choices — assuming you could get away with it.
There are certainly lots of people who would help you try to create a bogus Mauritanian identity. Google “fake Mauritanian” and you will see websites captioned “listings for fake Mauritanian death certificate”, “get a high-quality fake Mauritanian ID card”, “Mauritania invoice fake template”, and “where can I get a fake Mauritanian ID”.
And that’s just Google, not the dark web or other resources available to the smugglers who charge thousands of dollars to move West Africans to the U.S. Southwest border.
Vetting Challenges. Everything I’ve just told you is common knowledge among those who’ve followed asylum scams for decades, but what are the odds that the average Border Patrol agent in San Ysidro is even going to think about potential fraud when faced with a purported Mauritanian migrant? They are on the front end of the operation, not the back end where truth occasionally comes to light.
Not to blame the agents. Given the ready availability of fraudulent Mauritanian documents, how could any of them identify such a migrant, let alone determine that one doesn’t pose a danger to the national security or a threat to the community before releasing that migrant under the Biden-Harris release regime?
Other screening tools available to CBP aren’t sure things, either. I’ve explained in the past that CBP submits migrants’ names and their biometric data to the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) to determine if they are a match with the terrorist watchlist.
TSC’s ability to identify watch-listed aliens is only as good as the information it has available, so unless it finds a biometric match, it must rely on the name the migrant gives — which as the foregoing shows, isn’t a sure thing in the best of circumstances and is a particular challenge with alleged Mauritanians.
And while there hasn’t been a terrorist attack in Mauritania since 2011, that doesn’t mean that even true Mauritanians don’t pose a threat.
In December 2022, Mauritanian national Fawaz Ould Ahmed Ould Ahemeid (aka: Ibrahim Idress, aka: Ibrahim Dix) was charged in federal court in New York for his role in three attacks against Western targets in Mali on behalf of terrorist groups Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Al-Murabitoun. Those attacks resulted in the deaths of 38 individuals, including U.S. citizen Anita Ashok Datar.
“Blinking Lights”. The government’s own national-security experts have been warning for nearly a year that the border crisis poses a terrorism risk.
For example, in its Homeland Security Threat Assessment 2024 (HSTA), DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis advised that:
Record numbers of migrants traveling from a growing number of countries have been encountered at our borders this fiscal year. ... Terrorists and criminal actors may exploit the elevated flow and increasingly complex security environment to enter the United States.
Those concerns were echoed by FBI Director Chistopher Wray in December 2023 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee:
I am concerned that we are in … a heightened threat environment from foreign terrorist organizations for a whole host of reasons and obviously their ability to exploit any port of entry, including our southwest border. … We have seen an increase in so-called KSTs, “known or suspected terrorists”, attempting to cross over the last five years.
In an apparent allusion to Chapter 8 of the final report of the 9/11 Commission, “The System Was Blinking Red”, Wray also warned senators at that hearing: “I see blinking lights everywhere I turn.”
Note that Chapter 8 of that report started with the following: “As 2001 began, counterterrorism officials were receiving frequent but fragmentary reports about threats. Indeed, there appeared to be possible threats almost everywhere the United States had interests — including at home.”
Past is prologue, and if Illinois prosecutors are correct, migrant terrorist threats have materialized just as Bensman and others have warned. For an innocent man who was headed to synagogue but now recovering from his wounds, countless police officers caught in the gunfire, and any future victims of border-bred terrorism, it should never have come to this.