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.”