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A former top Department of Homeland Security official who briefly led Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) believes that President Biden’s border policies may have worsened the threat of Iranian sleeper cells operating within the United States.
Following U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security issued a National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin warning of an increased risk of domestic terrorism from individuals inspired or directed by Iran.
“Definitely,” said former acting ICE Director Jonathan Fahey when asked if the Biden administration’s border crisis may have contributed to the domestic threat.
“I think one thing that’s really concerning about that: One, they weren’t doing any really meaningful vetting in the last administration. The second part of it is, you know, we have probably 2 million known gotaways come through the last administration, and the people that went through the non-ports of entry, we knew they went through but nobody caught them, so we have no idea who went through,” Fahey said.
Fahey, who also served as deputy assistant secretary at DHS, emphasized that adversaries likely took note of the lax border enforcement.
“But the thing that’s concerning is all of our adversaries knew at the time that we basically, in all intents and purposes, had an open border. So, to the extent they wanted to send people in to spy, to collect intelligence, to do us harm, to plan to do us harm in the future, they had carte blanche to get anyone in that they wanted to with really little or no resistance,” he said.
“That’s what makes what Biden, the Biden-Mayorkas open border just so unconscionable,” Fahey added.
Fox News reported that about half of the 1,500 Iranian nationals who crossed illegally under the Biden administration were released into the U.S.
According to the DHS bulletin, “The likelihood of violent extremists in the Homeland independently mobilizing to violence in response to the conflict would likely increase if Iranian leadership issued a religious ruling calling for retaliatory violence against targets in the Homeland.”
“Multiple recent Homeland terrorist attacks have been motivated by anti-Semitic or anti-Israel sentiment, and the ongoing Israel-Iran conflict could contribute to US-based individuals plotting additional attacks,” the bulletin continued.
Former FBI assistant director Chris Swecker also criticized the administration’s actions: “We don’t know where those thousand Iranians are and who knows how many others got across the border. We missed an opportunity when they caught and released those thousand. We missed the opportunity to gather intel by interviewing them and thoroughly vetting them. We just simply let them go, which is gross negligence on the part of the Biden administration.”
Tom Homan, former acting ICE director and now known as Biden’s “border czar” critic, issued a similar warning on Sunday Morning Futures: “We don’t know who they are, where they came from, because they got away because border patrol is so overwhelmed with the humanitarian crisis that Biden created. Over two million people crossed the border and got away. That is my biggest concern. And that’s what created the biggest national security vulnerability this country’s ever seen.”
Customs and Border Protection data shows that under the Trump administration, there were no known migrant releases in May, compared to roughly 62,000 under the Biden administration in the same month.
