The U.S.-Mexico border has essentially been porous for most of the last three years. Because of the prolonged and public nature of this border insecurity, foreign criminals, intelligence officers/agents, and terrorists have had the time, incentive, and means to infiltrate the United States.
In 2024, the FBI’s key border concern has focused on the Central Asian ISIS-K syndicate of the Islamic State terrorist organization. The U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan has afforded that group a relatively safe haven free of effective U.S. intelligence, detection, and interdiction. ISIS-K has been involved in several major attacks, especially the March 2024 slaughter of nearly 150 civilians at a Moscow-area concert hall. Many of those involved in that attack were Tajik nationals. And while a number of other international ISIS-K attack plots have been disrupted, ISIS-K fighters practice generally impressive operational security to avoid detection. Consider, for example, that where U.S. intelligence provided to Russia in advance of the concert hall attack successfully highlighted the attack’s theme, it was limited in terms of specifying suspects and the specific target.
That brings us to a major scoop by the New York Post’s Jennie Taer on Tuesday.
Taer reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have arrested six Tajik-origin Russian passport holders over the past week. The arrests followed an FBI warning that one of the six was suspected of being linked to ISIS. Considering the Tajik identity of the people and ISIS-K’s operations targeting the U.S., if those arrested are terrorists, they very likely belong to ISIS-K. But note this bombshell in Taer’s report: The arrests were made after “one of the now arrested individuals was talking about bombs” on an FBI wiretap. This person “was previously released by federal authorities at the southern border with a court date next year, however it has since emerged he has potential ties to ISIS.”
Think about how worrisome that is from a counterterrorism point of view: The man was detained, released inside the U.S., then later found to have possible ISIS ties. Then, only after the FBI obtained a warrant to surveil him based on those suspected ties, was he found to be talking about explosives. It’s deeply disturbing that he and the other five arrested were able to act with such liberty until now. After all, if they were able to do so, how many others remain able to do so? How many others were never detained at the border?
Of additional concern is the six-person nature of this possible terrorist cell and its geographic dispersion among Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York City. Los Angeles and New York City are priority targets for Salafi-Jihadist groups such as ISIS-K, and Philadelphia is only a short train or bus ride from New York City. And where migrants in the U.S. know one another, they tend to stick together for mutual support. That this group separated among three cities offers a circumstantial but alarming indication that they may have had ill intent. Geographic dispersion is a technique employed by terrorists to mitigate flagging law enforcement attention and to reduce the potential of one arrest leading to the detection and arrest of others in a cell.
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ICE and the FBI will now focus on the potential that this is only one part of a larger terrorist cell or one of a number of other ISIS-K cells operating on U.S. soil.
One would think that arrests such as these would lead the Biden administration to take much more urgent action to secure the border. Again, the border threat intelligence alarm is blaring. National security is any administration’s first responsibility. But even if the administration fears that border security enforcement might alienate certain Democratic voters on the party’s left, the political consequences of a terrorist attack born out of a porous border would surely be catastrophic.