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Event Summary
Twenty-five years after 9/11, is the United States better prepared to prevent another terrorist attack?
The Center for Immigration Studies convened a panel to examine that question, discussing the role immigration and border security played in the attacks, the major policy changes that followed, and the national-security challenges that remain.
Former U.S. Senator and Attorney General Jeff Sessions introduced the panel and offered brief remarks. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest at the time of the attacks, Sessions was deeply involved in congressional oversight of immigration and national security in the years following 9/11.
The panel at examined how the attacks reshaped U.S. immigration policy, including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, changes to visa screening and information sharing, and increased attention to border security. The panel also revisited the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission: What was implemented? What was left undone? In addition, a European security expert discussed how 9/11 affected policy there as well.
Panelists
General Jeff Sessions, Former U.S. Senator and Attorney General.
Andrew R. Arthur, CIS Fellow in Law and Policy, who served as immigration oversight counsel to House Judiciary Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner beginning in July 2001 and worked on major post-9/11 immigration and national-security legislation.
George Fishman, CIS Senior Legal Fellow, who served for two decades as Republican Chief Counsel of the House Judiciary Committee’s immigration subcommittee and worked on major post-9/11 immigration and national-security legislation.
Jessica M. Vaughan, CIS Director of Policy Studies, who was at CIS on 9/11 and specializes in immigration screening, visa programs, immigration enforcement, and public safety.
Viktor Marsai, CIS Fellow, Director, Migration Research Institute in Budapest, and professor of security studies at Ludovika University of Public Service.
Moderator: Mark Krikorian, Executive Director, Center for Immigration Studies, Washington, D.C.
Date and Location
September 8, 2026
Washington, DC
MARK KRIKORIAN: Good afternoon. My name is Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. We’re a think tank here in Washington, and we’re online at CIS.org. I sometimes forget to make the plug, so I’m going to do it upfront and then I’ll do it again at the end.
The 9/11 Commission staff report on immigration failures that contributed to the attacks and what was referred to as terrorist travel begins with the following sentence: “It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country.” Hopefully, people knew that before 9/11, but apparently not. And so that basic insight drove much of the congressional and executive response to the attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon. On this week’s 25th anniversary of the murder of thousands of Americans on our own soil, we need to ask whether we’ve learned the right lessons about terrorist travel and whether we’ve taken the steps necessary to prevent another 9/11.
One of the most important changes has been a more serious approach to vetting foreigners asking to enter our country. In a forthcoming report we’ll probably be releasing Thursday, we find there’s been huge increases in the number of immigrants that we have let in since 9/11 from countries that are either hostile to us or are home to powerful terrorist movements. For instance, the number of people here from Afghanistan has increased almost 500 percent since 9/11; a 400 percent increase in the number of Yemenis; close to a hundred percent increase in the number of people from Pakistan, Syria, and Somalia. Have we vetted these people accurately? With regard to the Afghans, the answer is definitely no. Whistleblowers and federal agencies have described an alarmingly frivolous and lackadaisical approach to screening that has already resulted in a number of terrorist attacks by ostensible Afghan allies, including one last fall on National Guard soldiers just blocks from the White House.
So, to assess – we’re here to assess our progress since 9/11 and the work that remains to be done. And for that, we have a distinguished panel of experts.
Jeff Sessions needs little introduction. As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Immigration Subcommittee on 9/11 and later as attorney general, he’s had a central role in the responses – both legislative and executive branch – to the attacks.
Following him will be Andrew Arthur – Art Arthur – who is a CIS fellow in law and policy who served as immigration oversight counsel to House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner beginning just a few months before 9/11, and worked on many of the legislative immigration and national security bills that that followed it.
Next will be Jessica Vaughn, CIS director of policy studies, who specializes in immigrant screening and visa programs and public safety.
Next will be George Fishman, who is CIS senior legal fellow, who served for two decades as Republican chief counsel in the House Judiciary Committee’s Immigration Subcommittee and I think for part of that time was Art’s boss, and therefore also worked on many of the post-9/11 bills.
Finally, Viktor Marsai, who’s a CIS fellow and is also director of the Migration Research Institute in Budapest and a professor of security studies at Ludovika University in Budapest, will talk about the European perspective and the European response to 9/11.
So if you could start, Mr. Attorney General.
JEFF SESSIONS: All right. Thank you, Mark. And thank you for CIS and what you’ve done over the decades. CIS is not just a think tank; it is THE think tank that made the difference in the battles over immigration, the huge amnesty bills that were offered when I was in the Senate and we fought them. And we sought and got good information constantly from this group, and without it – there was no other place to get it. This was the only place to get a lot of great information that when you’re in a battle, a national battle that’s in the news every day, and all the establishment crowd – the masters of the universe – all those people were pushing for these bills, you needed information to respond. So, Mark, it’s been an honor to work with you and your team over the years.
I see Steven Camarota. I used to never make a floor speech without calling Steve to ask him, am I sure these numbers are right, Steve, you know? But you’ve been there, and it’s important. And we’ve been successful to a degree I don’t think we would have thought possible in – you know, 20 years ago.
The success of the Trump administration in the last couple of years exceeded what I thought was possible. It’s been a tremendous advancement. I know some of the things they are doing could be challenged, will be challenged. In my view, the Republican leadership in the House and the Senate need to be advancing some legislation. It’s not true we can just depend on the president to figure out how to win all of these battles. So, anyway, count me in as saying they need to get off their duff and start moving some legislation that will help us do the job that we need.
So, on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, I was thinking I was in the Supreme Court. I was chairman, I think, on the – or, ranking Republican on the Senate Subcommittee on Judiciary in the Judiciary Committee, and Chief Justice Rehnquist was presiding over the Judicial Conference, and they had us speak there. And he didn’t want to leave. And we weren’t watching the TV, and he – I don’t think – he wasn’t watching the TV. They came in and passed him a note. He wasn’t going to let some terrorist run us out of the Supreme Court building, you know? (Laughs.) But eventually he did. And all of our people on Capitol Hill, nobody knew where to go, what to do. And I feel real bad to this day about not being more effective in getting back to my office and helping the young people we had, and old people too, to seek safety. So this was a real threat.
So in this effort that we’re involved in, we have to know a few things that we worked on legislation, the Patriot Act. People expected action, and Bush delivered action. Some still complain about this or that in the Patriot Act bill, but I thought fundamentally it was solid and that no part of it was against a precedent of the Supreme Court.
So, first, nobody has a right to enter this country. The United States decides who comes here. And lawful immigration policies need to be established, carried out on a daily basis. No great nation needs to have this patchwork of failed actions around our country. And we need to determine that our immigration policy will support the national interest – will be good for America.
Trump says, correctly, that they are sending a lot of criminals to us. Well, Alabama, we – I used to tell my Texas friends when a person got in trouble in Alabama in the 1800s we ran them to Texas. (Laughter.) The sheriff would say, get your butt out of town. They didn’t care where he went, whether they raped somebody else or shot somebody else. He just didn’t want him – he didn’t have room in his jail for him and then they weren’t going to hang him, so they sent him out to Texas. So this – we are getting a lot of that. So we need to be sure that we are on the right path.
And America, I hope we all know, is not just an idea; America is a nation. It has laws that apply in our country, not outside the country. And we decide what those laws are, and we decide who gets in and who not.
You mentioned vetting, Mark. The vetting deal is very important. When Obama and John McCain and a bunch of them wanted to get involved in the Syria battle with Assad, and I opposed that after supporting all the other adventures, and – but then we had refugees, and Europe decided it had to take all these Syrian refugees, and the United States was going to take a whole bunch of Syrian refugees. And I remember at a hearing I asked the witnesses: Well, can we – do we know what their criminal record is? Can you access the criminal record of some Syrian before you admit him to the United States? No. Well, can you – does anybody know, have a list of terrorists in Syria? Well, no. So we were expected to admit large numbers of so-called refugees that there was no way we could ascertain whether they were friend or foe. That’s not necessary. If a country can’t provide us – that country is insufficiently able to provide us with background information, I don’t think we should take them except in extraordinary circumstances.
So, I don’t know, we went through a lot of battles. I’m so proud of President Trump. The so-called “Muslim ban” that was a real good policy was carefully – in the end, it was carefully written, and you know, we had people who just opposed it and said it was terrible, terrible. But Supreme Court affirmed it, and a lot of battles like that that went on.
Art knows about the judges. That first term we approved – maybe 40 percent of the immigration judges were basically appointed by the attorney general, and we put some prosecutors on there and some military people on there to move cases and maintain the speed and not just convert a little normal case into a major deal.
So thank you for inviting me. Thank you here at this think tank and all the great work you’ve done. We’ve made great progress, but it’s fragile. We need some legislation and firm this stuff up and we will have done a historic effort to curtail excessive, abusive immigration, protect the national interest, and secure the safety and prosperity of the American people. Thank you, Mark.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Thank you. I keep – I keep wanting to say “Thank you, Senator,” even though you haven’t been in the Senate for a while.
But the before I let Art go, I just – my communication staff will spank me if I don’t point out that if you’re watching this live feel free to send questions to [email protected] – again, the email is [email protected] – and we’ll try to get to questions after our presentations. Art.
ANDREW R. ARTHUR: Thank you, Mark. Mark had mentioned the fact that I was here on September 11th. I actually got here six weeks before September 11th. I came over to the Hill on July the 20th of 2001, and before that I’d been at the Immigration and Naturalization Service. And this is actually a portfolio that I had from my INS days. This is from the INS office in Moscow, Russia, back when we used to have one. (Laughter.) And if you want to know about the Immigration and Naturalization Service, why it doesn’t exist anymore, that’s the front. Open it up; it’s printed upside down. (Laughter.) Because I can’t really think of anything that would better underscore the dysfunction of the old INS better than that.
And if you want proof about how dysfunctional it was, I was the acting director of the National Security Law Division at the INS. I was one of four lawyers that handled terrorism cases for the entire country at the INS. Now, we had line attorneys that did that job at the same time, and – but because I was in this position I can give you some insight into how we got to the point that on the morning of September 11th, 2001, a beautiful morning – the sky was clear, weather was perfect – 3,000 Americans were killed. It was a bad day. It was a bad day. As the attorney general mentioned, the American people expected action and they got action.
And one of the things that Congress did was it convened what was called the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, better known as the 9/11 Commission. I’m going to read you something that they said in their final report in 2004. Quote: “In the decade before September 11th, 2001, border security – encompassing travel, entry, and immigration – was not seen as a national security matter. Public figures voiced concerns about the war on drugs, the right level of immigration, problems along the Southwest border, migration crises, or the growing traffic in humans. The immigration system as a whole was widely viewed as increasingly dysfunctional and badly in need of reform.” See my portfolio. (Laughter.) “In national security circles, however, only smuggling of weapons of mass destruction carried weight, not the entry of terrorists who might use such weapons or the presence of associated foreign-born terrorists.”
Today, nearly a quarter-century later, we are very much back in that pre-9/11 mindset, only in many ways it’s worse. That’s in part because the last administration abandoned a policy that was followed by every prior one – every one – and that policy was deterring illegal entry at the border and the ports. And in the place of that deterrence policy, the Biden administration focused on what then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas explained in May ’22 was making sure “we have safe, legal, and orderly pathways (for) individuals to be able to access our legal system.” And by accessing our legal system, Secretary Mayorkas meant applying for asylum regardless of whether those migrants had asylum claims or even came seeking humanitarian protection. Alejandro Mayorkas either forgot or never knew the degree to which aliens who planned or carried out terrorist attacks on the United States has exploited that very same asylum system.
Take, for example, Pakistani national Mir Aimal Kansi. It was a name that everybody in this room would have known 30 years ago, but most of you probably aren’t familiar with. Mr. Kansi opened fire at the CIA in Langley, Virginia, in January of 1993, killing two agency employees and wounding three others. Just one month later his fellow Pakistani Ramzi Yousef masterminded the first World Trade Center bombing, which killed six and wounded more than a thousand others. He also made an asylum claim. Then there was Yousef’s accomplice, Ahmed Ajaj, who came illegally on the same flight with Ramzi Yousef . Mr. Ajaj got detained because they had room for him in Long Island, but Mr. Yousef was released. Mr. Ajaj was detained. He was the bomb maker. But he was still able to tell Yousef and the other conspirators what they needed to do to create that bomb.
It was against this backdrop that Congress passed a bill that Senator Sessions is familiar with, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, with the very difficult acronym AEDPA. And therein Congress explained, quote, “Alien terrorists, while deportable under the INA, are able to exploit many of the substantive and procedural provisions available to all deportable aliens in order to delay their removal from the U.S.” In that act, and in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, Congress attempted to close the loopholes Congress had – or, that alien terrorists had exploited to mandate the detention of all aliens who came illegally and to expedite removal proceedings and deportations.
The last administration ignored nearly all of those protections, releasing aliens Congress said must be detained – approximately 6 million by my count, including aliens from countries of concern, the very countries that Mark talked about earlier. They slowed proceedings rather than expediting them. And as the staff of the House Judiciary Committee put it in a report that they issued in October 2024, they terminated, dismissed, or administratively closed more than one – approximately 1 million pending cases under policies that the staff referred to as a quiet amnesty. We’re still digging ourselves out of all this.
While those 1990s attacks are largely forgotten today, they were so impactful at the time that they inspired Ramzi Yousef’s uncle, a guy named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to plan and carry out the attacks of September 11th. But in addition to remembering the CIA shooting, the first World Trade Center bombing, the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the Khobar Towers attacks, the attack on the USS Cole, the foiled Millennium bombing of Los Angeles International Airport, and of course 9/11, all planned by al-Qaida, we should also remember the June 2000 recommendations of the National Commission on Terrorism, better known to the extent that it’s known at all today as the Bremer Commission. Now, remember, this was 15 months before September 11th.
One of those recommendations, likely the most controversial one, called on the government to more closely monitor foreign students in the United States because of the threat they may pose. That was very controversial at the time, but that was a recommendation made more than a year before Hani Hanjour, a Saudi national who entered on a student visa, crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon on September 11th. And that was more than a year before Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, the two pilots that flew the planes, respectively, into the World Trade Center Twin Towers, were allowed to remain and attend flight school while the INS processed their vocational student visas. And yet, it wasn’t until the second Trump administration that DHS really became serious about tamping down on student visas, limiting student stays in the United States, and targeting the fraud that facilitates their ability to enter and remain here.
The Bremer Commission also recommended that the government make greater use of the Alien Terrorist Removal Court. This was a tribunal that was created expressly for the deportation of terrorists – of alien terrorists in AEDPA back in 1996, and yet it took until this year – 30 years after the ATRC was created and 26 years after the Bremer Commission recommended it be used – that the first case was ever brought to that court.
The past two years show that President Biden was wrong when he claimed Congress needed to act in order for DHS to secure the border. He didn’t. The same is true of the terrorist threat to the United States. General Sessions is correct there are things that we need to do, but our government has the tools it needs to keep ailing terrorists out; to identify, monitor, and deport the ones who are here. All it takes is will. But will is the one thing this honorable house cannot legislate.
With that, Mark, I yield back.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Thank you, Art. You’re yielding back the remainder of your time, but you didn’t necessarily have any remainder of time. (Laughter.) But that –
MR. ARTHUR: Well, I understand. I was sitting next to Jeff Sessions to be kind of inspired. (Laughter.)
MR. KRIKORIAN: OK. So, Jessica?
JESSICA M. VAUGHAN: I’ll take Art’s time. I wish I had a prop like Art brought of my time as a Foreign Service officer issuing visas, but I never wore a pinstripe suit. It would have been nice if I could have taken with me my visa stamp that I used a lot all day every day in my last assignment, but I didn’t bring that one. But even that shows how far we have come since I was a consular officer in the early ’90s. They don’t use rubber stamps anymore, I don’t think, but they definitely use a lot better systems to screen and issue visas.
As we’ve said, a number of failures and missed opportunities have been identified that facilitated the 9/11 plot. And the most significant that involved our immigration system were the failure to prevent the entry of the attackers, most importantly because of negligent nonimmigrant visa issuance policies, particularly in Saudi Arabia, about which a lot has been written but few people seem to remember.
The other is the ease of remaining here after entry, as Art mentioned – the lack of follow up on one of the terrorists – at least one of the terrorists, who was a no show at the school that they were issued a student visa to attend – and how easy it was for these individuals to change and extend their status after entry. They could get driver’s licenses. I think they had 36 of them among the 19 of the hijackers.
And finally, there was little knowledge and little information sharing among local law enforcement agencies and the feds about the immigration status that – of people who were being encountered. One of the 9/11 hijackers was pulled over on I-95 in Maryland headed north to New Jersey to meet his fellow hijackers. The state trooper who pulled him over had no one to call or check on him or, you know, even any way to prevent him from continuing on that journey. But a lot of that has changed now.
We have to acknowledge that Congress, certain administrations, and some state governments have made important improvements. The State Department does a much better job with background checks for visas. There are visa security units in certain embassies abroad. And they’ve made great improvements to the consolidated consular database that they use to check on applicants and where else they’ve applied, and access criminal history information and so on.
We have created and implemented a biometric entry system for air and sea, and a biographic entry system for identity, authorization, and for detecting overstays. We have a system now that tracks students and exchange workers to make sure that they show up at their school or where they’re going to be working if they come in on certain types of visas. There’s much more law enforcement agency information sharing. We have fusion centers. We have Secure Communities. We have the 287(g) Program and task forces run by ICE, and much better driver’s license security standards in those states that choose to adopt them. We had the Real ID Act. Many states have legal presence requirements in order to obtain a driver’s license; you can’t just waltz in with a nonimmigrant visa.
But I want to focus most of my remarks on some of the current vulnerabilities and unfinished business before us. And the basis for my comments is going to be what I have found in the first stages of an analysis of enforcement activity in cases of known and suspected terrorists who’ve been removed from the United States. These are – these are records about actual terrorists who have been interdicted, arrested, and removed from the United States by ICE, no doubt using some of the provisions in the 1996 Act that Art mentioned. This does not include terrorists who are still incarcerated or in custody or in proceedings, but it is a good sample of cases, and it’s based on open-source ICE records on removed terrorists starting with fiscal year 2023 to March 2026. And specifically, what I looked at is where they were from and how they entered and who caught them.
So there were 3,157 known or suspected terrorists removed from the country between October of 2022 to March of 2026, so a period of three-and-a-half years. Think about it; that’s chilling in and of itself, 3,157 known or suspected terrorists removed from the country. It was, however, not a gradual influx, or even gradual and steady removal of these individuals. Of the 3,157, two-thirds of them entered between 2021 and 2024 under the Biden administration. More than 2,000 of them entered under the Biden administration with the open border.
It is also important to remember as another caveat that in 2025 the Trump administration designated a number of transnational gangs and cartels as terror groups. I’m not going to dwell on those cases here, although I do firmly believe that it is appropriate and necessary to include certain transnational gangs and cartels as terrorists because they are. They have evolved over time into sophisticated organizations with deliberate schemes of violent intimidation and a history of threatening governance and civil society in a way that goes beyond just furthering their crime goals to actually seeking to control the societies in which they operate. But for today’s panel with a focus on 9/11, I want to focus on, for lack of a better word, the cases of those associated more traditionally with terror organizations like al-Qaida, ISIS, al-Shabaab, Hezbollah.
So I picked out the cases of the individuals from the list of special-interest countries that’s maintained by the State Department and others, and weeded out the gang and cartel operatives. And that left me with a group of 323 cases of removed terrorists from those countries, about 10 percent of the entire number – still a big number, I think; still too big a number. Again, the vast majority of them, 82 percent of the 323, entered under the Biden administration.
So how and by whom were they found? Fifty-four percent of them were arrested by the Border Patrol. Twenty-six percent of them were detected by CBP’s OFO at the ports of entry, both air and land inspections, mostly at land crossing points. Twenty percent were found by ICE in the interior, and we can assume that a good share of them were gotaways – not caught by the Border Patrol originally, or by CBP.
So what were their modes of entry? Eight-five percent of them came illegally, trying to cross the border. Fifteen percent of them came in or at least tried to come in legally. So that’s 48 cases of terrorists attempting to exploit our legal immigration system. And of those who were trying to come in legally, three-quarters of them were coming as temporary visitors using nonimmigrant visas or through the Visa Waiver Program. I can’t see the exact type of visas that they had, but of the Visa Waiver Program terrorists one of them was a Belgian citizen who was born in Tunisia and the other was a French citizen born in Tajikistan.
So another thing that I noticed was that about half of these traditional terrorist associates were from the typical special interest countries like the ones Mark has mentioned – Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, et cetera – but half of them were born in or citizens of countries of the former Soviet Union. I think this is a pretty new development in our terrorism problem. And there are five countries in particular where they came from: Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Russia. Also, of the 35 who came in bearing visas, 25 of those terrorists, the ones coming in on temporary visas, were from the former Soviet Union, and all but two entered under the Biden administration. So, clearly, these terrorists from these particular countries are trying to come in on visas.
What can we learn? What does this tell us? Well, of course, the land border remains the most critical point of defense for homeland security. If it’s open, they will come. But terrorists are also still exploiting visas in significant ways, especially nonimmigrant visas, and especially from the newer threat countries of the former Soviet Union. So we have to be vigilant in our nonimmigrant issuance system as well.
None of the post-9/11 improvements that we have, whether in law or policy, matters at all if a president comes in and ignores the law, and writes new policies that will enable people to come using catch and release, inappropriate parole, TPS grants, and so on.
So as far as unfinished business, we need to maintain the land border security, obviously, including and especially at the ports of entry. We need to complete the entry-exit monitoring system – authorized, what, eight times by Congress? – especially at the land ports of entry. We need to boost visa security – more visa security units in these new emerging threat countries, more careful vetting of immigrant visas and any nonimmigrant visa that gives someone a long-term stay in the United States. Travel bans help, but some of these countries that I’ve mentioned are not even covered under the current travel bans.
And just to give you an idea of the scale of the problem, in FY ’24, which is the last complete year of statistics that I have on this, there were 114,000 nonimmigrant visas and 15,000 immigrant visas issued to individuals from those five former Soviet countries. So that’s a big haystack to be trying to track down.
We need to address overstays, create more consequences for visitors and their sponsors. The visitors with visas from these countries have very disproportionately high overstay rates compared to visitors from other countries, especially Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. We obviously need interior enforcement. And we cannot neglect fraud detection, because there are so many pathways for people who are here illegally or come in on a temporary visa to adjust, whether it’s marriage, OPT, or even U visas. Not all immigration fraudsters are terrorists, but pretty much all the terrorists are immigration fraudsters.
Thank you.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Thank you, Jessica.
And before we move to George, just a reminder: If you have questions – we’ve gotten a few of them already – send them to [email protected]. George?
GEORGE FISHMAN: Mark, thank you. This panel is very personal to me, as I know it is to Art. We both had to evacuate this building 25 years ago, and I think we both vowed at that point in time we would do everything we possibly could to make sure it never, never happened again.
The extraordinary thing about legislation – laws enacted post-9/11 is the usual situation is major immigration reform legislation is enacted once every decade or two. In fact, during one fallow period, I think I remember my wife asking: So, George, what have you been doing all these years? (Laughter.) It takes a lot to get legislation enacted, and that’s even with healthy Republican majorities. When it’s on a knife edge, you know, it’s exponentially more difficult. But after 9/11, there was an extraordinarily productive period of legislation that actually got enacted by Congress, and let me – let me just give you a sense of the timeline here.
From September 11th, 2001, within a few weeks President Bush sent up to Congress his proposed reform legislation, including immigration reform legislation. The House Judiciary Committee, which Art and I worked on – and Art and I, while the rest of the Capitol complex was closed because of an anthrax scare, we, you know, went into the building that was open in order to help our bosses hammer out the Patriot Act. And the House Judiciary Committee October 3rd passed its version of the Patriot Act. The House passed it October 12th. And it became public law October 26th, a month and a half after 9/11. Extraordinary.
Then Art and I both worked for Jim Sensenbrenner, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and all these pieces of legislation have his indelible fingerprints on them. And also – him and Phil Kiko, his chief of staff, just indelible fingerprints enabling this stuff to happen. November 2001, Mr. Sensenbrenner introduced legislation to break up the dysfunctional Immigration and Naturalization Service, as Art has demonstrated. Mr. Sensenbrenner made – well, he at one point called the INS the redheaded stepchild of the federal government and we started getting angry comments from redheaded stepchildren. (Laughter.) So that’s something – you know, a good lesson to learn as a – as a congressional staffer. But in any event, the legislation was inspired by Barbara Jordan’s U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, which had made these recommendations; passed the House April 2002; and, as I’ll say, the principles in that were later encompassed in the Homeland Security Act.
Now, in Mr. Sensenbrenner’s original legislation there was no Department of Homeland Security. There was no thought of a Department of Homeland Security. INS would be broken up into immigration service and enforcement components within the Justice Department. But once the Bush administration determined it wanted a Department of Homeland Security after 9/11, those principles got encompassed into the Homeland Security Act, became part of the Department of Homeland Security.
And, next, the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act. A lot of the credit for that goes to our former colleague Brian Zimmer. That was introduced in the House December 2001, enacted May 2002.
The Homeland Security Act. President Bush’s proposal came to Congress in June of 2002; by November, enacted into law.
Then, Art mentioned the 9/11 Commission. That was created in November 2002. By July 2004 it came out with its recommendations, some dealing with immigration, most not dealing with immigration. The two most important recommendations from our perspective were the need for a biometric entry-exit system, which Congress had actually mandated way back in 1996 – and I should mention we’re still waiting. So it’s been three decades; we’re still waiting. But the commission said we need that. We need to link biometric passports to good data systems and decision-making in part to fight terrorism. Also, secure identification. The federal government should set standards for the issuance of birth certificates and driver’s licenses. And that recommendation would get enacted shortly, again through Mr. Sensenbrenner’s leadership.
The 9/11 – the act to implement the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, introduced in September 2004, passed the House October 2004. Then we went to a conference with the Senate, which became a debacle. Many important pieces of reform which are in the law today – were enacted the year following that – were also in the House-passed bill but were stripped out in conference because, unfortunately – and I have the utmost respect for the late Senator Joe Lieberman, but his staff basically ensured that most important immigration provisions were stripped out of the conference report. And I’m talking about things such as requiring the use of expedited removal for aliens in the country less than five years. Undoing the – back in the ’60s, The Wrecking Crew was a very famous group of session musicians who played many of the hits of the 1960s. Well, the Ninth Circuit had become the wrecking crew of asylum law, and in – you know, in terms of making it almost impossible for immigration judges to successfully deny asylum to people who did not deserve it. The bill would have corrected many of those abuses. A lot of that, the credit goes to Art Arthur. Improving the inadmissibility and the ability to deport, to remove, terrorists and their supporters from this country. The first acts to do that started with the Patriot Act. It went halfway. This would have gone the whole way, and that was stripped out. The ability to waive laws necessary – environmental laws, what have you – to ensure expeditious construction of border fences. You know, at that point in time, border fencing required by the 1996 Act still had not been built because of environmental lawsuits. And so all those things, stripped out.
There was a sort of revolt among House Republicans about this. Tom Tancredo realized that under House Republican rules, you know, 50 members signed a petition, they could demand a meeting of the Republican Conference, and that occurred. It was both because of some defense-related outrages in the conference report and the immigration ones we talked about. And lo and behold, leadership made a commitment to Mr. Sensenbrenner: Let this go. Let us get this bill enacted, the 9/11 Commission recommendations enacted. First must-pass vehicle the next Congress, the stuff that was taken out, you’re going to get it in there. I was, to be honest, dubious at the time of leadership promises. I still am. We once had a – you know the signs businesses have, you know, “we are closed”? Well, we had a sign up on the subcommittee office. It was modified a little bit. It said, basically, we are hosed, because that was often the result of the promises of leadership. But they came through. The next year, the Real ID Act got into the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for the armed forces, for tsunami relief from the Sri Lanka tsunami, et cetera; must-pass legislation if there ever was one. And that’s how these provisions got into law. Art’s fixes to asylum, et cetera; the driver’s license provisions; the greater ability to remove alien terrorists and their supporters; that’s how it happened.
There are things that have yet to occur. Once the driver’s license provisions, the mandatory that you – unless you have a driver’s license compliant with Real ID standards, it can’t be used for identification purposes. Finally took effect May 2025, 20 years after. But finally that’s off – that’s off the table.
I think the single most important one that’s out there is the asylum vulnerabilities. I think it’s desperately important that Congress fix the asylum vulnerabilities put in place by prior Congresses going back – going back decades. And you know, you can say, well, without those changes, how did President Trump manage to completely shut down the border almost immediately? And I mean, I’ve recently written about this. I mean, the real answer is he sort of – he basically suspended the ability of aliens crossing the border to apply for asylum. Is that consistent with the immigration law in the books, which say anyone in the United States has a right to apply for asylum no matter how they got here? Well, the Ninth Circuit – I’m sorry, the D.C. Circuit said it’s not consistent with federal law. I presume it’s going to go up to the Supreme Court. We’ll see how the Supreme Court rules. But if the Supreme Court rules, as the – as the D.C. Circuit did, that the law doesn’t allow for that suspension, then we desperately need the asylum laws to be fixed. Whether it’s as stark as leaving the U.N. refugee protocol, which may be necessary to do, or to make necessary fixes, it’s going to be extremely, extremely important.
But I will – I will wrap up with that.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Thank you, George. And I don’t know how many of you noticed he snuck in an obscure 1960s musical reference into his comment – (laughter) – which is something he constantly attempts in his written publications. And usually I catch it, but sometimes I don’t.
So, for our last speaker before we go to questions – remember, [email protected] – Viktor Marsai giving us a view from the other side of the Atlantic.
VIKTOR MARSAI: Thank you, Mark. So now, last but not least, I would like to speak about what 9/11 and actually the arrival of modern jihadist terrorism meant for Europe and how was it connected to immigration.
First of all, we have talked online that during the pre-9/11 era in Europe terrorism, of course, existed, but it was mainly domestic terrorism, homegrown terrorism connected to separatism or left- or right-wing radicalism like IRA or Rote Armee Fraktion previously, and there was not real religious violent extremism in Europe before 9/11. After, thanks to the era of al-Qaida, we can see the arrival of al-Qaida infiltration and facilitated terrorist attacks – the Madrid attack, 2004; London Metro attack, 2005 – but still at that time it was limited and it was not connected to the immigration debate in Europe.
The new wave of terrorism, jihadi terrorism, started with the rise of Islamist states which were connected also the so-called migration crisis in 2015, when we could see a sharp increase in jihadi terrorism in Europe. According to Europol TE-SAT report, in 2015 151 people were killed in terrorist attacks in Europe. And from these 151, 150 were killed in jihadi attacks, and almost 700 people were wounded in this. In the coming years, thanks to the collaboration between the European security services and increasing counterterrorism measures, the numbers declined. Last year – again, according to TE-SAT report – six people were killed in terrorist attacks in Europe, but still the overwhelming majority of them were killed in jihadi terrorism. And if we check the arrests, almost 500 people were arrested in Europe according to terrorism-related incidents last year, and three-fourths of them were connected to jihadi terrorism.
If we have a look at the relationship between jihadi terrorism and migration, Simon Cottee, the expert of terrorism, came out a recent publication about the connection of jihadi terrorism and migration. He analyzed the data between 2015 and ’25, for 10 years, and he found that 45 percent – so almost half – of all jihadi plots in Europe were committed by migrants. And very important that according to the methodology of Simon Cottee he didn’t account migration background people who arrived as kids to Europe and were socialized in Europe; he counted only people who were adult when they arrived to Europe. And these people committed in the last 10 years, or between the two, one hundred attack(s), altogether 137 perpetrators. And during these attacks, almost 300 people were killed and 1,200 were wounded. So it’s a very significant phenomenon. And still, when the debate on the nexus of immigration terrorism started in 2015, the mainstream discussion and argumentation was that it’s just the securitization of migration and there is no real relationship between them.
The discourse changed in the last, let’s see, two, three years in Europe. Interestingly, what we experienced that the Solingen attack in Germany in August 2024 was a turning point, when rejected asylum applicant – a Syrian man, Issa Al Hasan – committed a terrorist attack and it significantly changed the discourse in Europe and in Germany. And now it’s clear that Europe have to do something with this challenge.
But it’s a big difference, I think, comparing to the United States, that both the internal and external circumstances in Europe are very different. So currently there are, according to rough estimations, 50 million Muslims in Europe, and many of – so 6, 7 percent of the population – and many of them are like, we can say, traditional communities integrated very well in the last decades. You know, the big – first big wave of Muslim immigration started in the 1950s and ’60s, and we can find highly integrated communities among them in Europe. But still, we have to confess that the problem of parallel societies are existing in Europe. And we have to take consideration also that in the last 10 years, thanks to the immigration crisis, the lower estimates at least 4 million immigrants arrived, asylum seekers, with Muslim backgrounds. And the problem is that many of them arrive from countries which don’t have real diaspora communities in Europe – from Afghanistan, from Syria, from Somalia – which make extremely complicated the integration process. And it’s not accidental that many of them – or, if we are checking who are committing the terrorist attacks, they are belonging to these groups.
Our neighborhood is also problematic. So, from the Middle East to North Africa and the Sahel region, we can find the most lethal terrorist organizations in the world, from the aforementioned al-Shabaab to different affiliates of Islamic State or Boko Haram. It’s interesting to see that both al-Qaida in the early 2000s and its first years Islamic State facilitated terrorist attacks in Europe. So it was a clear intention from them to conduct the attacks. After the fall of the caliphate, we could see that the affiliates which survived – Islamic State-West Africa Province; or al-Shabaab in Somalia, which is an al-Qaida affiliate – they concentrated more – mainly on their local agendas, you know, to dismantle the governments there and take power there. So they meant relatively low threats towards Europe. It also changed in the last two, three years. At least dozens of different attempts happened by these groups to attack European targets, not only in Africa or the Middle East but inside Europe, and it’s very complicated to stop them. And it’s very evident that they are trying to utilize their networks in the asylum-seeker and immigration communities in Europe.
A lesser extent, but we have to mention also that not only these let’s say, terrorist groups means a threat to Europe, but we see state-sponsored Islamist movements and sometimes radical movements in Europe. We have to mention the Muslim Brotherhood in different countries and, of course, different Salafist organizations in the country.
So what’s our conclusion? It’s key to know in the context of European immigration and immigration crisis who are entering into Europe, and it cannot happen without proper border protection. And numbers are key issues, OK? So – because it’s highly connected to integration and security checks. Perhaps Germany can integrate 10,000 immigrants annually. It’s sure that it cannot integrate 1 million immigrants annually. And again, perhaps Germany or Spain can check 10,000 immigrants who are coming or asylum seekers annually. It’s sure that they can’t check hundreds of thousands of people properly who are arriving to Europe.
Thank you very much.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Thank you, Viktor.
We have time for some questions. We’ve gotten a number of them. I think one of them that is kind of applicable, broadly speaking, is with regard to vetting people who want to move here and trying to screen out potential terrorists. Is that even possible from either countries that are hostile to us and aren’t going to be, you know, connecting their DMV databases to us, or countries that just don’t have any such thing and they’re living with only minor exaggeration in the Stone Age, and so they have no information? So, I mean, what is – sort of whoever wants to take that, I don’t want to have a whole dissertation on it, but what are your kind of quick thoughts on is vetting even meaningful for people coming from many of the countries we’re worried about?
MR. FISHMAN: Mark, I think for many countries it is not. It’s totally illusory. As Rodney Scott, former Border Patrol chief now head of Customs and Border Protection, once said: You know, these people could be angels. They could be serial killers. We have absolutely no way to know, either because we have a noncooperative foreign government if not a hostile foreign government or we have a nonfunctioning foreign government. There simply are no records. So unless someone has been – has been caught committing crime in the United States, essentially we have absolutely no ability to vet them – of course, countries like Afghanistan and things like that. So no legislation can possibly deal with that. The only thing that can deal with that is what President Trump has done, bans to entry under Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. That’s the only way to deal with those sort of situations where there is no ability to vet people.
MS. VAUGHAN: I agree. And then I would just add that it’s not only can no database or law stop people; there’s no technology that we can develop that’s going to read someone’s mind or be able to know if they’re a threat. And so we have to think about strategically just limiting the number of people who are able to come to the United States.
MR. ARTHUR: Yeah. And I’m reminded of what Jim Comey, the then-FBI director, stated in 2015 when he was talking about vetting Syrian migrants. And he said: If they don’t make a ripple in a pond – in the pond, we’re not going to know anything about them.
We’ve seen this repeatedly throughout history. There was one major case that I handled when I was at the INS involving something called Operation Quick Transit II where we brought a bunch of Iraqi nationals, oppositionists, out of the northern (no-)fly zone to the United States. We brought them to Guam, and we knew nothing about any of these people. In fact, the – when the U.S. went up to bring these people from Iraq into Turkey, they had brought two Kurdish interpreters. Nobody – none of the 632 people involved – actually spoke Kurdish. We literally knew that little about these people.
So it is impossible, but it underscores why it is so important to have border security. If we make people go through visa processing, if you can’t get me a clean record from the local police chief at least – which is only as good as that sounds – we’re not going to give you the visa. So, if you enter illegally, at that point it’s game over. We literally don’t know anything about you and it’s all just a matter of determining people’s credibility.
MR. KRIKORIAN: It is a question for everybody, but I’ll start with you, Senator. What’s the – is there one single most important legislative change that Congress should make? In other words, what’s the one thing that would be, you think, the most effective that Congress should be doing?
MR. SESSIONS: You know, I don’t know. Judge Art, he was a(n) immigration judge, would know better than I. But I’m concerned about what George Fishman has expressed, the ability of the president to expedite the denial of frivolous asylum claims. And if that is lost, it’s going to have a monumental impact.
For example, as attorney general I really didn’t know I had the power, but we appointed a – Trump approved a whole bunch of new judges in addition to the ones we had. We had a number of vacancies. We had people retiring. And so we did – I think over half of the judges were appointed under the Trump administration by his attorney generals. And all of this – just imagine the amount of money, time, and effort. So the Border Patrol or the ICE officers have to come to court. It gets continued. The judge has to come. He has to have a recorder, a court reporter. The defendant comes. His lawyers come and they come up with excuses why the hearing can’t be completed today, it has to be come back. And eventually there’s a denial of – and then they appeal, and then they want to be – we don’t have space to hold them while the appeals are going on. They all get released. And then it finally gets denied. And then they say you’re to deport and you got two weeks to deport, and you think they’re showing up then after having been in the country, what, a year or more, even? So this is a monumental thing.
And in my opinion nobody from Canada, for example, ought to be able to claim asylum from government, nor Mexico. So you had some lady that said her police husband was mean to her, and – but Mexico is a big place, so you have to flee. You can’t live in the town with your husband or ex-husband, so – but there are a lot of other places in Mexico you could go. You don’t just say: I think I’d like to go to Belgium. I’m going to claim asylum in Belgium. I mean, this is serious business.
I mean, a nation has got to be able to carry out its objectives. And I think there are many, many things that could be done in immigration law that would substantially reduce the repetitive, wasted effort by our law officers and make the whole system work better. As it is it’s not working effectively, and I think legislation is needed. In my opinion, it ought to be brought up, put on the floor of the Senate, and fight cloture for weeks if need be. Make these people vote who don’t want a lawful system of immigration and expose them for the poor policies they’re advocating.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Yeah. Before I get sort of a one-sentence response from anybody who wants on those, what is THE most important thing? I’d just note that, as an American, I think a trans activist who went and applied for asylum in Belgium, and he didn’t like it, and so he came back. (Laughter.)
So, Art?
MR. ARTHUR: I agree with General Sessions. We definitely need asylum reform. It’s critically important. It’s the thing.
If you think about it, there are two chokepoints in our legal immigration system. The immigration court is one. The deportation is the other. And immigration court has become such a chokepoint because the asylum laws are written in such a way that anyone can claim that they are a member of a particular social group, as per Mark’s contention. And then you have two things. You have a factual issue, is anything this person telling me true; and a legal issue, is that a cognizable particular social group. Congress needs to do exactly what General Sessions said.
Most countries in the world are perfectly safe. I’ve heard asylum claims from England, Ireland, Germany. A guy lived in a dumpster in Sausalito who was claiming asylum from Australia. I mean, it’s these – when we see things like this, they make us laugh but they underscore how, you know, flawed the asylum laws are. We need to be able to make claims quickly and correctly, give people protection if they need it, but the vast majority, no, don’t, and send them home.
MR. SESSIONS: The bill, the Immigration Act, is 600 pages. It is designed to create a lawful system of immigration. These great lawyers have found loopholes throughout the bill over decades and those loopholes have overruled the law. And, basically, we’re not able to enforce it.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Jessica?
MS. VAUGHAN: Yeah. I agree on asylum –
MR. KRIKORIAN: Art had, like, eight sentences, so I’ll give you one. (Laughter.)
MS. VAUGHAN: OK. Yeah. I agree on asylum, but I would just also add that I think that we need to have similar consequences for visa overstaying as we have for crossing the border illegally, considering that we don’t really know but maybe 40 percent of illegal immigrants are visa overstayers.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Any ideas, George, on one thing?
MR. FISHMAN: Well, yeah. Well, first, I need to say that, contrary to what Art said, I may not have been a member of any particular social group in junior high school, but that’s water – (laughter) – under the bridge. When I –
MR. ARTHUR: (Inaudible) – clique in a social group, George. Anyway, please proceed.
MR. FISHMAN: I totally agree on asylum, but asylum to me includes withholding of removal and Convention Against Torture, because if we reform asylum and don’t reform those other two, you know, the problem just moves down the street. The one thing about Convention Against Torture is asylum, withholding of removal, if you’re a certain level of criminal you’re barred from receiving those benefits. Anyone from Adolf Hitler on down is fully eligible for Convention Against Torture relief. Terrorists have received Convention Against Torture relief.
MR. KRIKORIAN: And just for people who don’t know the details, when you say you fear return, you’re considered both for asylum, relief under Convention Against Torture, and what’s called statutory withholding of removal. So it’s like all one package. And if you fix asylum but don’t fix the others, then the loophole just kind of moves from one place to another; still a loophole.
So I had a question kind of not really related, but I think this is maybe more for you, Jessica. What do you think is the most dangerous visa or the most dangerous nonimmigrant means of entering the country with regard to security? Any thoughts on that?
MS. VAUGHAN: Any of the long-term nonimmigrant visas, whether it’s a fiancé visa, a work visa, an exchange visitors visa, anything that gives someone – a student visa – anything that gives people a long time here before they’re going to be looked at again.
MR. KRIKORIAN: And the long time, why is that important?
MS. VAUGHAN: Because it gives you time to get your driver’s license; just, you know, sort of go about your business without anybody thinking to check about whether you’re maintaining your status; hook up with other jihadis; carry out your plot; marry a U.S. citizen; apply for a visa as a victim of crime. So many opportunities – apply for asylum. So many opportunities in our system to let people launder their status.
MR. KRIKORIAN: There’s one more question. I want to respect people’s time but this was something I kind of referred to in my introduction, was about all the Afghan allies, so-called, on special immigrant visas or some other way they were let in. A lot of these people are going to become eligible – going to start being eligible next year for U.S. citizenship because of when they were let in. And so any thoughts on, you know, the administration’s prioritizing re-vetting of those people? Again, if you have – if you don’t have any information, the vetting may not work. But there may be something we missed. And so any thoughts on the importance of re-vetting this particular population, especially since we’ve got – we’re coming up to the first anniversary of the National Guard attack at Farragut West Metro?
MR. ARTHUR: If I could, there were a number of inspector general reports that came out after the debacle that was the fall of Kabul. And again, we have a solemn anniversary coming up, but it’s also important to remember the 13 servicemembers that lost their lives in Kabul during the calamitous withdrawal.
One of the inspector general reports brought up the fact that about half of the people who were brought here weren’t checked against DOD information. Now, a big part of the reason for the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004, 9/11 recommendations, was get rid of stovepiping. And yet, we had half of the people who were brought to the United States, you know, who we didn’t know, weren’t checked against DOD information. And that’s the kind of information that we really rely upon the most. Were your fingerprints found on an IED? Are you a person who was on a list of, you know, known oppositionists, known terrorists, known jihadis in Afghanistan? And so, again, if they are here and we are not going to simply deport them en masse, we have no option but to re-vet them against everything that we have, against all of the information that the U.S. government has in its possession, everything our allies have in our – in their possession. And so, you know, we need to do it. Otherwise, we run too big a risk. Remember, September 11th happened because it was planned and implemented out of Afghanistan.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Go ahead.
MS. VAUGHAN: I was just going to say also this program, with all of the problems that we now know about in terms of vetting, should not be expanded or extended.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right. Because there are proposals to expand and let in more people under this special immigrant visa or something similar. Yeah.
I want to leave it there. Let me just remind everybody we – actually, our research director, Steven Camarota, after the attacks did a report on our site – it’s called “The Open Door” – where he actually looked at the immigration histories, not only of the 9/11 terrorists – and this was before the 9/11 Commission report came out – but also all the other people, the people that Art had referred to, Mir Aimal Kansi and all the – how did they get here? What was their immigration history? What were, essentially, kind of the lost opportunities to stop them? So that’s – it’s not just of historical interest; that is still of real relevance today.
Thank you all for coming in. Thanks for everyone who tuned in. The recording, obviously, will be on our website at CIS.org. And we hope you tune in for future programs. Thank you, and thanks to all the panelists.