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The impact of the border crisis under the Biden administration likely added fuel to the fire of an Iranian sleeper cell threat domestically, according to a former top Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official who briefly led Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Following the strike on Iranian nuclear sites by the U.S. on Saturday, DHS issued a National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin warning about the risk of domestic terrorism from Iranian-backed or inspired perpetrators.
“Definitely,” former acting ICE director and Fox News contributor Jonathan Fahey said when asked if the Biden border crisis likely made matters worse domestically.
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“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,” he added.
Fahey noted that other countries were likely paying close attention to the heavy flow of people crossing into the country illegally. He briefly led ICE toward the end of Trump’s first term and was the former deputy assistant secretary at the DHS.
“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,” Fahey said.
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“That’s what makes what Biden, the Biden-Mayorkas open border just so unconscionable,” he said.
Fox News reported that roughly half of the 1,500 Iranian nationals who came through illegally during the Biden administration were let go into the U.S.
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“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,” the DHS bulletin stated.
“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,” it continued.
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Other national security experts also doubled down that the releases and gotaways during the Biden administration continued to pose a risk.
“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,” former FBI assistant director Chris Swecker told Fox News Digital.
Border czar Tom Homan also sounded the alarm about gotaways on “Sunday Morning Futures” right after the Iran strikes.
“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,” Homan said.
When it comes to known releases, the Trump administration released nobody in May, compared with roughly 62,000 releases under the Biden administration last May, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
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