As reported on Wednesday, eight people with suspected ties to ISIS have been arrested in the U.S. on immigration violations. Those eight people from Tajikistan were arrested in New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, and are being held on immigration violations, having entered the U.S. through the southern border.
AFN spoke with Kyle Shideler is a senior analyst for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy. He warns there is no way of telling how many more such infiltrators there might be.
"The threat is both individuals who are coming across the border in groups or small cells that may already have a plan – perhaps a Paris- or Moscow-style attack that's already planned within their network," he explains. "[But] it could be individuals who have no known connections to terrorists or don't even have connections to terrorists at the current time, but are later indoctrinated or radicalized to engage in terror."
The Associated Press reported: "The nature of their suspected connections to the [Islamic State] was not immediately clear, but the individuals were being tracked by the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force, or JTTF. They were in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which made the arrests while working with the JTTF, pending proceedings to remove them from the country."
Shideler isn't ruling out people connected with Hezbollah or Hamas coming to the United States, adding those are sophisticated terror cells with plans to do "a wide variety of things."
"They could be coming to indoctrinate and recruit, they could be coming to fundraise, or they could be coming to do surveillance and reconnaissance in preparation for a terror attack," he suggests. "All those things are possible, and the reality is we just have no way really of knowing for sure when you have an open border that literally anyone could walk across."
Meanwhile, Shideler doesn't see a quick fix to the situation.
"I think that's one of the reasons why immigration would need to be front and center for people thinking about the direction of the country, because there are things happening now that it's possible that they may not be reversible," he says. "We may not have time to wait for [a new administration in] January 2025 to figure out what we're going to do with some of these problems."
The national security expert doubles down on his warnings, dismissing President Joe Biden's recently announced executive order promising "new actions to secure the border."
"You still have people coming [into the country] in record numbers who are utterly unvetted and who you simply cannot guarantee who they are or whether they will remain in the country even after their asylum claims or immigration claims are denied.
"You just don't have the ability to do that kind of interior immigration enforcement," he concludes, "and part of the reason you don't have that ability is frankly because of the Biden administration."
