New York Post, March 18, 2024
AUSTIN, Texas – The New York Post brings us yet more news in an overly familiar new genre: a Lebanese immigrant caught at the El Paso-Juarez border admitted he was a member of the terrorist group Hezbollah and entered with plans to build a bomb in New York.
It’s important to note that no US government agent forced this confession out of Basel Bassel Ebbadi, 22, as part of any well-worn border counterterrorism program.
No, Ebbadi bushwhacked medical personnel in the health section with the unsolicited confession.
And if he hadn’t, he seemed poised to be ushered into America with everyone else crossing the border from all the nations of the Middle East and world who arrive without any identification.
None of this is a surprise, yet no one in power has lifted a finger to stop it.
A well-oiled counterterrorism program was put in place at the border after 9/11, and worked exceptionally well catching and filtering suspected terrorists, as I wrote in my book, America’s Covert Border War: The Untold Story of the Nation’s battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration.
But as I have opined in these pages and also testified before Congress until blue in the face, those border counterterrorism programs have collapsed under the massive swells of illegal immigration purposefully organized by the White House.
The Biden administration knows this.
In his latest testimony to Congress only two days before Ebbadi gave himself up, FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that a “wide array of very dangerous threats that emanate from” the Southwest border.
“So, I want to be a little bit careful about how far I can go in open session, but there is a particular network that has, where some of the overseas facilitators of the smuggling network have ISIS ties that we’re very concerned about and that we’ve been spending enormous amount of effort with our partners that we’re investigating,” Wray said.
My testimony and Wray’s are in line with the Biden administration’s own 2024 Homeland Threat Assessment, which clearly warns on page 12 that “terrorists” are among criminal actors that “may exploit the elevated flow and increasingly complex security environment to enter the United States.
“Individuals with potential terrorism connections continue to attempt to enter the Homeland illegally between ports of entry … via the southern border,” the assessment reads, tallying that 160 terror suspects were actually detained crossing in fiscal 2023.”
Some of those are going to be sent by Iran.
“Among state actors, we expect Iran to remain the primary sponsor of terrorism and continue its efforts to advance plots against individuals in the United States,” the assessment states.
The near-miss of a watch-listed Hezbollah border crosser is all the more confounding in light of the April 19, 2022 accidental release of a Lebanon-born Venezuelan on the watch list.
ICE agents were not able to track him down to Florida for two full weeks.
DHS’s inspector general’s office investigated and concluded it happened, in part, that Border Patrol agents “were busy processing an increased flow of migrants.”
There are many other cases of this happening.
Border Patrol waved through a watch-listed Somali member of the al-Shabaab terrorist group near San Diego.
He was free to do damage for most of a year before authorities untangled their mistake and picked him up in Minneapolis.
There was a watchlisted Yemeni caught in Mexico as he was about to cross who got released anyway without US advance warning, which prompted a manhunt for him.
Late last year, New York police arrested a Senegalese man wanted in his home country for “terrorist activities” who somehow got into the American interior.
And a Pakistani illegal immigrant on the watchlist was accidentally released before US authorities luckily caught up with him a day later.
The Biden administration refuses to do the right thing for homeland security in the continuing age of Islamic terrorism, and Americans are the ones at risk.
The border is a time bomb.