(Headline USA) Eight people from Tajikistan with suspected ties to the Islamic State group have been arrested in the United States in recent days, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
The arrests took place in New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. The suspected terrorists, who entered the U.S. through the southern border, were being held on immigration violations, said the sources, who were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation by name and spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
The nature of their suspected connections to ISIS 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.
The individuals from Tajikistan entered the country last spring and passed through the U.S. government’s screening process without turning up information that would have identified them as potential terrorism-related concerns, said one of the people familiar with the matter.
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued a statement confirming the immigration-related arrests of “several non-citizens” but did not detail specifics. The agencies noted that the U.S. has been in a “heightened threat environment.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray deflected from the open-borders concern, which has been the de-facto policy of the current administration, by claiming that the U.S. is facing accelerating threats from homegrown violent extremists as well as foreign terrorist organizations, particularly in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel.
The linking of the domestic terrorism concerns with the Hamas attack marks a stunning departure in its own right as Wray has often implied that the threat from domestic violent extremists is linked to white nationalism—a canard that has rarely borne out in reality and appears to have resulted in the nation’s top law enforcement agency prioritizing partisan politics and political correctness over the pursuit of legitimate criminal concerns.
Nonetheless, with the November election nearing and outrage over the Biden administration’s border policies becoming clearer, panic that a terrorist attack could throw the delicate political dynamic further into turmoil has led the Democrat leadership and its deep-state flunkies at least to appear to get serious about the legitimate external threat.
At one recent congressional hearing, Wray conceded that officials were “concerned about the terrorism implications from potential targeting of vulnerabilities at the border.”
The Biden administration in August said that it had detected and stopped a network attempting to smuggle people from Uzbekistan into the U.S. and that at least one member of the network had links to a foreign terrorist group.
“The FBI and DHS will continue working around the clock with our partners to identify, investigate, and disrupt potential threats to national security,” the agencies claimed.
Although President Joe Biden recently signed an executive order that nominally reinstated some of the tougher Trump-era policies, empowering immigration officials to put tighter limits on the number of people allowed to swam across the southern border, experts noted several loopholes that, in fact made the order meaningless.
Notably, the limits applied only to certain countries, none of which were the countries where immigration has been a major concern; and it did not apply at all on the northern border. Even the number admitted before the quota set in was set inordinately high, still allowing what would amount to millions of illegals to enter the country on an annual basis.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
