(Headline USA) The Department of Homeland Security admitted this week that it has identified more than 400 illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. by a network affiliated with ISIS.
Federal law enforcement has arrested 150 of the known illegals, according to a senior DHS official, but another 50 remain unknown. All were brought over from Central Asian countries.
DHS believes the illegals are linked to ISIS “because of some of the individuals involved” in smuggling them across the southern border, the official explained. “And out of an abundance of caution, [DHS wants to] make sure that we exercised our authority in the most expansive and appropriate way to mitigate risk because of this potential connection being made.”
Other officials, however, tried to downplay the significance of the report.
“There is no intelligence that suggests the remaining individuals pose an imminent threat to the homeland,” another DHS official said, according to Fox News, adding that the majority of the 400 illegals are not even considered “subjects of concern.”
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas likewise dismissed the report as “incorrect.”
During a press conference in Arizona on Wednesday, he said, “We do not have identified 400 people with potential ISIS ties, and let me again assure you that individuals who are identified to have those ties would pose a concern to us from a public safety and security perspective and would be priorities for detention and removal,” he said. “Precision when one is dealing with the facts is very, very important.”
The news comes just weeks after eight Tajikistani nations with ties to ISIS were arrested by immigration officers in New York City, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. All eight crossed the southern border illegally and were released by border officials into the interior of the U.S. They were allegedly vetted by border officials, but their ties to ISIS apparently went overlooked.
