It wasn’t a cartel smuggler. It wasn’t a man in the shadows. It was a tourist. A visitor who arrived through the front door sat quietly at the edge of the room and never left.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman stepped off a plane in August 2022, one more name on a passenger manifest. He entered the U.S. on a B2 visa — a system built on trust and thin paperwork. By the time his visa expired in February 2023, he had slipped into the blur of America’s most overlooked threat: the invisible army of those who enter legally, then vanish. In May 2025, Soliman emerged not with a suitcase but with Molotov cocktails, attacking a pro-Israel rally in Boulder, Colorado. He didn’t just overstay. He burned his way back into view.
Soliman is not an outlier. He’s a product of a system built for optimism but ripe for exploitation.
Visa overstays now account for nearly 40 percent of undocumented immigration. That’s not a footnote — it’s a structural flaw. In FY2023 alone, over 565,000 visitors overstayed their welcome. By mid-2024, almost 400,000 were still in-country. There is no exit gate, no tap on the shoulder. No biometric trail. The system hopes. It doesn’t check.
And here’s the twist: the most abused visa categories aren’t just in volume — they’re in intent. Many of the highest overstay rates come not from economic powerhouses but from politically volatile states. According to 2023 data, several countries, mostly Muslim-majority or conflict-ridden, recorded overstay rates exceeding 40 percent. Among student visas, the trend is sharper: over 30 countries saw violation rates above 20 percent, particularly in nations where radical ideologies can fill the vacuum left by fragile institutions. (RELATED: How Student Visas Became the New Trojan Horse for Immigration Fraud)
This isn’t about guilt by nationality. It’s about acknowledging geopolitical context. The modern visa system is based on Cold War-era optimism: paper forms, implied good faith, and an assumption that people with a round-trip ticket will eventually use it. But the world has changed, and with it, so have the incentives. For many, a visa is not an invitation — it’s an escape hatch.
The U.S. government knows this. Nigeria, Sudan, and Eritrea have been booted from visa programs due to high fraud and overstay rates. Meanwhile, countries like India and China, which send tens of thousands of students, show far lower rates of violation. The issue isn’t volume. It’s volatility.
Yet even among these known risks, enforcement is timid. Tourist and student visa applicants undergo cursory checks — less scrutiny than opening a bank account. Once they’re in, tracking lapses into bureaucratic faith. They become invisible until they choose not to be. (RELATED: Bribing Illegals to Self-Deport Might Be the Only Real Solution Available to Trump)
And when they do reappear, it’s not always benign. Mansur Manuchekhrivich, a Tajik national, overstayed his visa and wired $70,000 to ISIS. Adham Hassoun, a recruiter for jihadist fighters, was allowed to stay in Florida until his conviction years later. In 2024, two Jordanians — including a student visa overstayer — attempted to breach Marine Corps Base Quantico. FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Congress: “The ones we’re most worried about may have entered legally.”
After Boulder, Senator Jim Banks introduced legislation to treat visa overstays as illegal entry — subject to criminal charges and bans. “A person who overstays a visa,” he said, “should be treated no differently than someone who jumps our southern border.” It’s a pragmatic fix to a wilfully overlooked risk.
And still, the political focus remains fixed on fences — visible, vote-getting, easy to campaign against. But the real security lapse is procedural, bureaucratic, and buried inside DHS spreadsheets. In 2019, over 1.2 million temporary visitors had no recorded departure. Today, ICE receives thousands of overstay leads annually and pursues only a sliver.
Not all overstayers turn violent. But enough have to make complacency unforgivable. In Texas, a Kenyan visa violator was charged with serial homicides. Dozens more have been linked to serious crimes — fraud, cybercrime, human trafficking. These are not border-jumpers. They’re visa-holders. Once.
What’s truly radical is pretending 800,000 visa violations a year don’t matter, and trusting that none of them will come with a fuse.
Because sometimes, the most dangerous border in America isn’t made of steel and sensors. It’s a line of code in a government database. One that never gets checked.
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