President Joe Biden’s lax immigration enforcement and open borders policies made this country highly vulnerable to acts of terrorism.
One of the big lessons of this weekend’s anti-Semitic Molotov cocktail and flamethrower attack in Boulder, Colorado by Egyptian national Mohamad Soliman, is how vulnerable we’ve made ourselves to infiltration by foreigners looking to do violence or acts of espionage. That can be in the form of lone wolf ideologues, terrorist cells, or well-coordinated actors from hostile foreign governments and organizations.
The Trump administration has been correct to pin a large portion of the blame for the Boulder attack on Biden.
“The Biden Admin granted the alien a visa and then, when he illegally overstayed, they gave him a work permit,” Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, wrote on X Sunday.
“Immigration security is national security,” Miller wrote. “No more hostile migration. Keep them out and send them back.”
That’s right. As more details emerge about Soliman, a picture is emerging of a man who should never have been allowed in the country and flagrantly abused our immigration system once he was here.
“Soliman came to the U.S. on a tourist visa in August 2022, according to a source from the Department of Homeland Security,” News Nation reported. “One month later, he applied for asylum. Soliman, his wife and their five children have been living in Colorado Springs, Colorado, since.”
Soliman was reportedly granted a work permit in 2023, but it expired in March. Soliman’s wife and five children were taken into ICE custody Tuesday.
Some have called this threat overblown, but that notion should be gone after Sunday. How many more people like Soliman, radicalized by the Israel-Gaza conflict, are still living in the U.S., potentially plotting other acts of violence?
There are certainly signs that other people willing to commit similar acts of terrorism have come into the country over the last four years.
The House Judiciary Committee released a report in August indicating the Biden administration released 99 potential terrorists into the country since January 2021.
“Under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, of the more than 250 illegal aliens on the terrorist watchlist who were encountered by Border Patrol at the southwest border between fiscal years 2021 and 2023, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released nearly 100 of them, with at least 34 others in DHS custody but not yet removed from the United States,” the committee said in a press release.
Illegal aliens came from a total of 36 countries, the report says, with an “active” terrorist presence, “including Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Mauritania, Pakistan, Russia, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.”
Notice that Soliman’s home country of Egypt is on that list.
How many more potential, foreign-born terrorists are lurking in America?
In 2024, the Department of Homeland Security, “identified over 400 immigrants from Central Asia and elsewhere who crossed into the U.S. in the past three years as ‘subjects of concern’ because they were brought by an ISIS-affiliated human smuggling network,” NBC reported last June.
Eight Tajikistan nationals with suspected ties to the Islamic State were arrested that month, but as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement director told The Daily Signal’s Virginia Allen at the time, this didn’t solve the problem. Not only were there likely many people in the U.S. connected to terrorist groups, but the vetting process made it difficult to ensure that the people brought in “legally” weren’t a danger to Americans.
“Thousands of terrorists in the world are not found in any database,” Homan told The Daily Signal last June. “That is why we need to end catch and release and reestablish the ‘Remain in Mexico’ [policy].”
Looks like Homan was onto something.
Even former FBI Director Christopher Wray admitted in 2023 that the border crisis was opening the U.S. to the potential for an escalation of terrorism. He said of terrorists at a Senate hearing:
Obviously, their ability to exploit any port of entry, including our southwest border, is a source of concern. There is a lot of discussion about numbers, and numbers are important. But let’s not forget that it didn’t take a big number of people on 9/11 to kill 3,000 people. While numbers are important, numbers don’t tell the whole story. And we have seen an increase in KST, known or suspected terrorists, attempting to cross over the last five years.
Given the potential for deadly attacks on American citizens it seems like security should have been heightened, that visa vetting should have been aggressive.
The Trump administration is turning things around on that end and clearly prioritizing American security. But after four years of open borders nonsense and courts that want to continue those policies as long as possible, this problem can’t be solved overnight.
The far Left wants to “globalize the intifada.” Some of those who wish to do violence are home grown. But Biden’s border policies gave them a massive opening to magnify the threat on American soil. Shameful. It’s a good reminder the problem with Biden was about much more than just his poor health and mental condition.