According to a shocking new report from the New York Post, the Biden Department of Homeland Security has acknowledged that “an ISIS-affiliated human smuggling network” has brought more than 400 illegal aliens into the United States, and the federal government has lost track of at least 50 of them. The revelations have further raised concerns about the terrorist threat from the ongoing border crisis.
Even more astonishingly, according to three anonymous Biden administration officials, many of the 400 “persons of interest” were “released into the country by Customs and Border Protection because they were not on the government’s terrorism watchlist.” Now, however, border officials are scrambling to track them down following the discovery of “information that suggested a potential tie to ISIS,” specifically ISIS-K.
ISIS-K is an offshoot of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) that was established in 2015. The “K” refers to the Khorasan Province, a former jurisdiction in northeastern Iran that was divided into three new provinces in 2004.
ISIS-K generally operates out of Afghanistan and Pakistan and focuses its efforts on Central Asia. Like ISIS, they believe in strict adherence to Sharia law and have a prolific history of terrorist attacks in pursuit of that goal. ISIS-K was responsible for the 2021 attack on the Kabul airport that killed 13 American service members and more than 150 Afghanistan civilians. Most recently, in March, four ISIS-K gunmen stormed a concert hall in Russia and killed 144 Russian civilians, wounding hundreds more.
The central Asian country of Tajikistan has in particular become a major center of ISIS-K activity in recent years. All 12 individuals arrested in connection to the Moscow attack were Tajikistani.
Concerningly for the United States, according to government data, from October 2020 to May 2024, more than 1,500 migrants from Tajikistan have illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and are currently residing in the United States. While there is no reason to believe that any individual Tajikistani migrant has connections to ISIS-K, the influx of arrivals from this terrorist hotbed should at the very least have put the Biden administration on high alert.
However, it was only after an ISIS-linked group smuggled 400 people into the country, many of whom were from Tajikistan, that the administration moved to monitor and track them down. Although immigration authorities have arrested 150 of the individuals, at least 50 are still at large. While all of the 400 came across the same sector of the border, they were arrested in cities across the country, including Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia.
In a statement following the publication of the story, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-TN) blasted the Biden administration for its failure. “There’s literally no one President Biden won’t turn away—including illegal aliens from problematic countries smuggled in by networks connected to ISIS,” Green said. “Every alarm is flashing red, and my committee has long warned that this administration’s open-borders agenda is bringing bad actors into the homeland in droves. DHS has now admitted yet again that this is true.”
As the border crisis continues to escalate, so too does the terrorist threat, as bad actors take advantage of the chaos to slip into the country. In total, more than 370 individuals on the FBI’s terrorism watch list have been apprehended trying to illegally cross the southern border since Biden took office – an increase of more than 2,000 percent from Trump’s tenure.
While those potential threats have at least been captured, there is no telling how many people on the FBI watch list were among the estimated two million “gotaways” who have escaped into the interior of the country undetected under Joe Biden. Given that anyone who wants to do harm to the United States would have an enormous incentive to avoid capture, it seems likely that the proportion of terrorist threats among the gotaway population is even higher than it is among those who willingly turn themselves in to immigration authorities for processing or are otherwise apprehended.
Moreover, a series of largely unreported incidents in recent months also suggest that the country could be at far greater risk than the Biden administration has acknowledged.
In January, for instance, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested an illegal alien in Minnesota who belonged to the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab. In May, two illegal aliens from Jordan were apprehended trying to sneak onto a Marine Corps base.
Even Christopher Wray, Biden’s own FBI director, has warned about the terror threat from the border – telling Congress just days before the ISIS story broke that the agency has seen “over the last 5 to 6 years an increase in the number of known or suspected terrorists, in other words, watch-listed subjects attempting to cross the border.”
But while Wray and other Biden immigration officials claim to recognize the threat, Biden himself apparently does not, or if he does, has utterly failed to respond to it. Either way, the country is a more dangerous place as a result.
Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.
