Database: National Security Vetting Failures

Liberia national Mohammed Jabbateh, a ruthless Liberian warlord also known as “Jungle Jabbah”, managed to enter the United States and live in hiding for years in East Lansdowne, Pa. He married, started a family, and launched a shipping business, winning asylum from the U.S. government and, eventually, permanent residence, according to the Washington Post, but managed to evade federal investigation until 2013 and was sentenced to 30 years in prison in 2018. During the height of Liberia’s first civil war from 1992 to 1995, Jabbateh, while serving as commander of a warring faction known as the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy (ULIMO), committed various acts of “shocking brutality including rapes, sexual enslavement, slave labor, murder, mutilation and ritual cannibalism. He also used children as soldiers,” according to a Department of Justice press release, and was known to order the hearts cut from live victims whose relatives were forced to cook and eat them.

“This defendant committed acts of such violence and depravity that they are almost beyond belief,” said U.S. Attorney William M. McSwain. “This man is responsible for atrocities that will ripple for generations in Liberia.

Court records show key vetting failures occurred in the late 1990s, before the post-9/11 security screening reforms, when Jabbateh withheld information about who he really was in a 1998 asylum application that allowed him to enter the United States. He was granted asylum after screening in 1999, again lying on the forms about his wartime activities. However, from 2002 through 2011, after reforms, U.S. immigration authorities failed to learn who Jabbateh really was despite years of potential opportunities.

In 2002, Jabbateh sought to adjust his status from asylee to lawful permanent residence, and filed an application in which he again covered up his wartime militia involvement. For reasons unknown, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reviewers did not interview Jabatteh as part of his LPR application screening for almost a decade, in 2011, leaving him to prosper in business and enjoy raising five U.S.-born children. That is the post-9/11-reforms failure.

According to the war-crimes news website Global Geneva, “it was an open secret in the intelligence community that Liberian war criminals were living under their real identities in west Philadelphia.”

It’s unclear whether Jabatteh ever got his LPR status, but it doesn’t matter because federal authorities did not mount an investigation of him until 2013, the Washington Post reported. He was not arrested or charged until three more years after that, in 2016. The timeline shows he enjoyed freedom inside the United States from the time he applied for LPR in 2002, through his immigration screening interview in 2011 and until his arrest in 2016.

This time lapse likely had no connection to suspicions or tips that Jabatteh was a war criminal because, again, federal investigators did not mount an investigation until 2013, according to the Washington Post.

On April 19, 2018, a federal judge sentenced Jabatteh to 30 years in prison on several counts of immigration fraud, the longest sentence ever imposed for that crime.

Bangladesh citizen Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis came to the U.S. in January 2012 on an F-1 student visa to study cybersecurity at Southeast Missouri State University. His middle-class parents had sent him to a private school in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, but when he underperformed they decided to send him to a U.S. school as a means to put him on a better career trajectory. State Department officials at the U.S. embassy in Dhaka would have vetted him during their review of the F-1 visa during 2011.

But FBI counterterrorism investigators were the ones who discovered in the summer of 2012 that Nafis was already fully radicalized in violent jihad when he entered the United States on his F-1 visa and intending to conduct a terrorist attack, according to prosecutors and media reports. When he entered, for example, he brought with him bomb-making instructions and speeches by Anwar al-Awlaki, a now-deceased propagandist for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

He also immediately set about trying to recruit multiple individuals to form a terrorist cell for al-Qaeda, federal authorities later discovered and alleged. One fellow student noted that Nafis had spoken admiringly of Osama bin Laden.

“Nafis came to the United States radicalized and bent on fighting jihad here in our homeland,” U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch said in an August 2013 statement.

In a 2013 letter to the federal judge overseeing his case, Nafis wrote that “At my university in Bangladesh I did not have any real friends. So, when the radical students, who were influential and famous, were nice to me I fell for them easily.”

In fact, court records and New York Times reporting explained that “famous and respected” jihadists at his private college in Dhaka successfully had recruited him to violent jihad prior to his U.S. entry on the visa, and this was well known among Nafiz's family and associates. Any security vetting for the F-1 student visa might reasonably have discovered that he was dangerous had it included interviews of those in Nafis’ family, social, and school circles, in Bangladesh, where State Department personnel conducted the security vetting.

Nafis’ true intentions came to light in July 2012 because one of those he tried to recruit into his terrorism cell was an FBI informant, which led to an elaborate sting operation.

Nafis withdrew from his Missouri school after one semester and moved to New York City to conduct his terror attack, enrolling in a Brooklyn college for cover and working as a busboy at a Manhattan restaurant. With undercover FBI informants now in on his plans, Nafis considered killing a high-ranking U.S. official before settling on using a purported 1,000-pound bomb to destroy the New York Federal Reserve Bank. In a statement claiming responsibility for what he believed would happen to the bank, Nafis wrote that he wanted to “destroy America” by striking a blow at its economy. But Nafis also expected to kill women and children, citing quotations from “our beloved Sheikh Osama bin Laden” justifying such killing.

State Department officials later defended their security vetting by saying the process mainly includes checking various U.S. government databases and fingerprint records “on a case-by-case basis”, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland told reporters at the time.

But in the Nafis case, any evidence of his radicalization likely would have required more thorough methods beyond running database checks in case derogatory reporting on an individual was not yet known.

“The suspect did have a student visa to attend a legitimate academic program in the United States, for which he was qualified,” Nuland was quoted saying.

In 2013, Nafis was convicted of terrorism offenses and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

In 2009, 24-year-old Iraqi-born Palestinian Omar Faraj Saeed Al Hardan settled in Texas on a refugee visa after living for nine months in camps on the Iraq-Jordanian border. Less than two years later, in August 2011, USCIS granted him lawful permanent residence (LPR) during a process that would have required standard security vetting for terrorism ideology and activity. He was later caught up in a 2016 plot to bomb to Houston shopping malls.

FBI agents later learned that he was deeply radicalized by "at least" April 2013 and was expressing desire for martyrdom to another Iraqi refugee in Sacramento, Calif., named Aws Mohammed Younis Al-Jayab and earlier to relatives. Al Hardan's fellow refugee and friend in California, Al-Jayab, was a hardened al-Nusra Front and ISIS jihadist whose own jihadist battleground experience USCIS security vetters entirely missed. Al-Jayab was planning a return to the battlefield and actually did. Al Hardan wanted to follow and die in a "martyrdom" operation overseas or in a terror attack inside the United States, the FBI later discovered.

No public evidence could be found confirming that Al Hardan had radicalized before he received his refugee visa in 2009 and so vetting failure was unlikely then. 

But the Al Hardan case is included here on the analytical judgement that he likely was already an extremist by the time USCIS adjudicators granted him legal residence in 2011, given the intensity of his commitment to suicidal violence that investigators said was traceable to “at least” early 2013 and earlier to relatives.

Furthermore, Al Hardan's 2011 quest for immigration status was incorporated into his later jihadist planning because legal residence is a precondition to applying for U.S. citizenship, which he thought was needed to travel abroad to fight with terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq. Indeed, he did apply for citizenship in August 2014.

But that screening also did not turn up his radicalization or plotting. (In 2014, the FBI opened an investigation into Al Hardan as a potential terrorism threat during the investigation into the communications of Al Jayab and would not arrest him until 2016.)

His radicalization was discoverable in and around that early 2013 period, when Al Hardan repeatedly told family members he planned to die a martyr, and he was posting support for terrorist groups and attacks on social media for an unspecified period before his 2016 arrest. He also was collecting bomb-making components for potential plans to attack a military base in Grand Prairie, Texas, and to blow up two Houston shopping malls, federal investigators alleged in court records.

By the time Al Hardan applied for U.S. citizenship in August 2014, the citizenship vetting process would have been moot because the FBI already had an active investigation targeting him that involved undercover informants.

The government charged Al Hardan with attempting to provide material support and resources, including personnel, specifically himself; training; and expert advice and assistance to ISIS. In December 2016, a federal judge sentenced him to 16 years in prison.

The Bangladesh-born Akayed Ullah, in the service of violent jihad in December 2017, set off a large home-built pipe bomb during morning rush hour beneath the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. The bomb misfired and injured only him and three bystanders but would have claimed a great many more had it exploded as intended.

The Brooklyn resident entered the United States in 2011 at age 20 with his mother and three siblings on an extended-family reunification visa applied for by a supposed U.S.-citizen uncle. Adjudicators approved the family's lawful permanent residence visas quickly. Granted, American adjudicators in 2011 may not have been able to pick up on evidence at that time suggesting Ullah hewed to extremist ideology; the post-attack FBI investigation found evidence of radicalization only dating to 2014, when Ullah began posting on social media and plotting to commit violence.

Still, USCIS agents may have uncovered Ullah’s predispositions when the security vetting window opened elsewhere: Ullah was never related to his supposed “uncle”, according to more recent media reports, meaning Ullah, his siblings, their mother, and the “uncle” would have been implicated in visa fraud had adjudicators interviewed family members and associates.

The family would never have been granted the visas in 2011 had this detectable fraud been detected and therefore Ullah would not have been present when he began radicalizing in 2014 or for the 2017 attack he ultimately committed.

Far too late, DHS reportedly moved to deport his mother and siblings for fraudulently obtaining visas for which they were ineligible. Had that been discovered at the time of application the bombing would never have happened. In 2018, Ullah was convicted of six federal charges related to the terrorism bombing and sentenced to life in prison.

A decade after the 9/11 terror attacks, in 2011, U.S. State Department consular officers in Saudi Arabia expeditiously granted local citizen Naif Abdulaziz Alfallaj an F-2 student spouse visa, permitting him to enter the United States. Alfallaj settled with his wife, an F-1 student visa holder, in the Oklahoma City suburb of Weatherford where she was attending the local university.

But State Department security screeners in Saudi Arabia somehow missed the discoverable red-alert fact that in 2000 Alfallaj joined al-Qaeda and trained in the group’s notorious al Faruq camp outside Kandahar, Afghanistan. It was the same terrorist camp — in the same time frame — where al-Qaeda leadership selected, organized, and trained the 9/11 hijackers for the attacks on America. They likely would have been campmates.

Those State Department screeners, who might still have felt a weight of responsibility since Osama bin Laden and 15 of his 9/11 hijackers were born and radicalized in the kingdom, would almost certainly have denied Alfallaj’s visa had they learned of his common past with them. After all, the history of terrorist visa abuse was well known by 2011, including that 9/11 hijackers entered the United States after they submitted 23 visa applications during the course of the plot, 22 of which a less-schooled generation of U.S. adjudicators approved.

But ostensibly more-schooled immigration vetters of the post-9/11 generation did not know — but easily could have with a certain check — that Alfallaj very likely trained among the hijackers as a contemporary.

Instead, this visa security screening lapse allowed an al Faruq camp veteran to fly into America just as did his deceased campmates 10 years earlier — legally, with a visa based on fraud and lies. Alfallaj remained free in the American heartland, his alarming history and intentions unknown for another five years. Who he really was only came to light in October 2016, in a darkly ironic way.

It did when he applied to a pilot school near Oklahoma City, just minutes from the flight school in Norman where, infamously, two of the 9/11 terrorists from Afghanistan camps received pilot training for the airliners they hijacked.

In late 2016, the school provided his fingerprints to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA, formed as a result of the attacks), which ran them and got the hit, prosecution court records later showed. Alfallaj’s prints matched 15 found on a 2000 “Mujahedeen Data Form” application, which al Qaeda bureaucracy in those days required aspiring terrorist camp trainees to submit. The prints had been awaiting a match in U.S. databases since December 1, 2001, when American soldiers recovered them in a raid on an al-Qaeda safe house in Afghanistan.

During the lengthy counterterrorism investigation that followed, FBI agents found that Allfallaj had remained true to violent jihad while in the United States even if the public record reveals no sign that he was going to attack the homeland. Two years after moving to Oklahoma in 2013, he joined an online extremist forum and, using his old al-Faruq camp nickname, expressed desire to join armed jihad in Afghanistan or Chechnya. He didn’t get the chance to kill there or here.

On February 5, 2018, the FBI arrested the 34-year-old Alfallaj on charges that he lied on the visa application and to the FBI about his terrorist past. In 2019, a federal judge sentenced Alfallaj to 12 years in prison, after which he will be deported to Saudi Arabia.

Turkey-born Oytun Ayse Mihalik had been studying and working in the United States since at least 2002, probably on an F-1 student visa initially to gain educational credentials from a Long Island university to practice as a pharmacist, and then likely on an H-1B skilled worker visa she obtained in July 2006. She married a U.S. citizen in 2007, qualifying her to eventually apply for a lawful permanent residence green card, which would not have been necessary for her as yet since she already had a sponsored work visa good for several years.

The couple settled in Orange County, Calif., Mihalik using her pharmacist credentials to work for a national chain of drug stores.

By the time Oytun Mihalik decided to apply for the green card, sometime in 2010, she was leaving her husband and was soundly radicalized as a supporter of violent jihad, apparently also following in the footsteps of an older U.S.-based brother who suddenly departed to Pakistan, court records show. At one point as she and her husband were breaking up, Mihalik wired money to an al-Qaeda terrorist in Pakistan with whom she began intensely communicating on social media channels about her brother. She sent the money understanding that it was for that terrorist to build a car bomb for attacks on U.S. troops, a later FBI and ICE-Homeland Security Investigations counterterrorism investigation found.

There would have been plenty of red flags for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services LPR application security screeners to find had they looked hard enough, perhaps interviewing family members and friends, in the months prior to issuing her the LPR green card, who could have reported her radicalization. USCIS granted her LPR in January 2011 despite obtainable evidence that she had been fully radicalized for several years.

For example, much later, her husband would report that by 2009, Mihalik had returned from a lengthy stay in Turkey with a newfound religious fervor and interest in securing her green card under false pretenses. By 2010, she was planning to follow her radicalized U.S.-based brother in joining the same terrorist group in Pakistan on “religious pilgrimage”.

USCIS missed another chance to learn, only a month or two before issuing the green card, in December 2010, of her radicalization and plans. Mihalik’s just-separated husband had gone to ICE Homeland Security Investigations agents with a tip about her radicalization, that she posed a terrorist threat to the homeland, and with an allegation of marriage fraud.

Her husband reported to the HSI agents that he believed Mihalik had married him under “false pretences” for the green card, according to the Los Angeles Times. He described a new religious fervor in his wife after the Turkey trip (in 2009, giving USCIS security screeners plentiful time to detect radicalization, perhaps through careful family interviews, before they issued the LPR status).

“I go, ‘Listen, did you marry … me for my citizenship and do you want to harm someone here.’ And she looked at me blank and she said, ‘If I have to kill people for Allah, I will,’” the husband reported, according to a transcript filed with court papers.

Instead, Mihalik was free to plot and support at least terrorist activity overseas aimed at the murder of western military personnel and civilians.

In her U.S.-based collaboration with the Pakistani terrorists, Mihalik used an alias and sent the last of three different wire transfers to Pakistan the same month she received her green card, in January 2011. Federal prosecutors later said she was fully engaged in supporting violent jihad and knew the money she sent would be used for a car bomb.

Just as the federal counterterrorism investigation triggered by her husband was taking off, Mihalik managed to get to Turkey in February 2011. Upon her August 2011 return, the FBI and HSI officers interviewed her at the airport about the wire transfers and her relationship with the terrorist operative. After another interview with agents later that August, Mihalik tried to leave the country using a one-way ticket to Turkey but was arrested on terrorism charges before she could board.

In 2012, Mihalik pleaded guilty to making false statements in a terrorism investigation, admitting she knew her donation would be used to prepare for and carry out attacks against U.S. military personnel and others overseas. In 2013, a federal judge sentenced her to five years in prison with orders that her green card be revoked and that she be deported to Turkey.

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.”

Faustin Nsabumukunzi, a 65-year-old Rwandan national, entered the United States in September 2004 as a refugee after applying for status with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (USINS) in August 2003. During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Nsabumukunzi, an ethnic Hutu, served as a sector councilor in Kibirizi, Nyaruhengri commune, Butare prefecture, in southern Rwanda. In this leadership role, he orchestrated atrocities against ethnic Tutsis, setting up roadblocks to detain them, directing Hutu militias to commit murders and rapes, and personally participating in violence. On April 21, 1994, he led an attack at his administrative office, striking Tutsis with a club and referring to their bodies as “garbage” or “trash” after ordering their removal. He concealed these actions in his 2003 refugee application for entry into the U.S., when it appears that he falsely claimed to be a simple beekeeper with no criminal history. In 2006, he applied for Lawful Permanent Residence via Form I-485, allegedly lying about his past again, and USCIS approved his green card on November 14, 2007.

In 2008, a Rwandan community-based court convicted Nsabumukunzi in absentia for genocide, sentencing him to life imprisonment; this would have been an available record to the U.S. government. In September 2009, Nsabumukunzi filed a Form N-400 for naturalization, denying involvement in persecution or crimes. USCIS failed to detect his 2008 conviction, marking the first missed opportunity. In 2014, the Public Prosecutor of Rwanda also indicted Nsabumukunzi for crimes related to the genocide. On January 13, 2015, during an N-400 interview, he allegedly perjured himself under oath by denying his genocidal past, but USCIS did not uncover it, constituting a second missed opportunity. However, the application was denied on April 27, 2015, for unrelated reasons of “failure to establish good moral character”. Additionally, in 2016, Interpol Rwanda issued a Red Notice for his wanted status.

On June 21, 2016, Nsabumukunzi filed a second Form N-400, again allegedly lying about his past, with the application still pending as of June 2025. On August 7, 2020, he renewed his Permanent Resident Card via Form I-90, submitting photocopies of his existing card. USCIS missed his Red Notice and Rwandan conviction, a third missed opportunity. Between 2021 and 2023, Nsabumukunzi traveled internationally, including extended stays in Togo, returning to the U.S. on March 17, 2023, using a refugee travel document. On May 20, 2023, he filed a Form I-131 for travel to South Africa and Madagascar, explicitly claiming to search for relatives who may still be alive after the Rwandan Genocide. USCIS’s failure to detect his criminal history during this process marks the fourth missed opportunity.

On April 24, 2025, ICE Homeland Security Investigations arrested Nsabumukunzi in Bridgehampton, N.Y. On April 22, 2025, he was indicted on three counts: visa fraud under 18 U.S.C. §1546(a) for false statements from 2007 to 2023; attempted unlawful procurement of naturalization under 18 U.S.C. §1425(a) for perjury in his 2016 application; and attempted procurement of naturalization when not entitled under 18 U.S.C. §1425(b) due to knowledge of his lack of good moral character from genocide participation. Each charge carries a maximum ten-year penalty. He faces potential extradition to Rwanda. Upon hearing the charges, he reportedly said, “I know I’m finished.” Credible eyewitnesses, including former neighbors in Rwanda, identified him as a genocide leader.

Despite being a flight risk due to frequent international travel, Judge Joanna Seybert released him on a $250,000 bond. Reportedly, a wealthy Hamptonite paid Nsabumukunzi’s bond so that his beekeeping services would be uninterrupted; this claim is unconfirmed. Furthermore, the DOJ notes that there is reason to believe the defendant is currently unemployed. 

The case, pending in the Eastern District of New York as of August 2025, highlights four post-2008 USCIS failures: the September 2009 naturalization application; the January 13, 2015 interview; the August 7, 2020 green card renewal; and the May 20, 2023 travel document application. These allowed a convicted genocidaire to live in the U.S. for a continued 17 years undetected, despite a myriad of available records and international alerts. Furthermore, the mere fact that Nsabumukunzi was a Rwandan adult man by 1994 should have alerted USCIS authorities about any potential criminal history. Additionally, on at least one occasion, Nsabumukunzi explicitly mentioned the genocide to government officials; this, too, should have prompted some kind of research. 

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.

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.

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.