Lt. Olivarez says officials don't know who's coming across border: 'Keeps us up at night'
Texas DPS Lt. Chris Olivarez speaks from Brownsville after President Biden and former President Trump's visits to the border.
Imagine living next door to an individual on the FBI’s terror watch list. This is a terrifying thought that has become a dangerous reality – maybe more often than anyone could fathom – under the administration of President Joseph R. Biden.
Over the past few months, we have seemingly observed a new wrinkle in the deluge of suspected terrorists actually being caught at the border. We know about the suspected terrorists who were identified and arrested between ports of entry (169 at the southern border in FY23, and 58 so far in FY24) – not to speak of the hundreds of thousands of ‘gotaways’ whose identities are not known.
What many people may not comprehend, though, is that there are other suspected terrorists (or some who were affiliated with terrorists) who were caught, but released because of inaccurate or incomplete information during their processing.
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Yes, you heard that right. Our own government has had suspected terrorists held for processing and allowed them to walk free into a community – possibly near you.
Hundreds of migrants, predominantly from Venezuela, cross the Rio Grande with the intention of seeking humanitarian asylum by crossing the border between Mexico and the United States in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico on December 05, 2023. (David Peinado/Anadolu via Getty Images)
One such story happened recently, when Americans learned that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested a suspected terrorist inside the country. Shockingly, the apprehension occurred over 10 months after the man from Somalia was encountered and released by the U.S. Border Patrol at the southern border.
How did this suspected terrorist manage to walk out of the hands of border agents and settle into a community around unsuspecting American families for months on end? According to a media report, the individual’s name was run through the terror watch list, but the search came up empty due to a "mismatch."
This frightening episode is not the only time the Biden border crisis has allowed a suspected terrorist to walk free in a United States town or city.
In October 2023, ICE announced that Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) in New York City had arrested a Mauritanian or Senegalese citizen, who was wanted by officials in his home country for suspected terrorism.
This individual illegally crossed into the U.S. in my state of Arizona near Lukeville, where, like the Somali man, he was processed and released for travel to New York City. One week later, Homeland Security Investigations agents in the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division transmitted information to ERO NYC about this individual’s background, leading to his arrest.
In a similar story last summer, the FBI was reportedly looking for over a dozen illegal aliens from different countries, including Uzbekistan. After these immigrants entered the country to seek asylum, they were released by agents – just like thousands of men and women each week at the southern border.
U.S. intelligence then discovered that, for their travel to America, these individuals had utilized the assistance of a smuggler who was tied to ISIS. None of this critical information was available to border officials at the time of the encounters; it wasn’t until later that the FBI put the pieces together and activated field agents all around the nation to locate these illegal immigrants.
These are three stories that ultimately went well for the country – at least in the result. No one knows, though, what these men might have been planning or doing in the interim between their entry into the United States and their later arrests.
In the case of the immigrants connected to the ISIS terrorist, some of those individuals may still be outstanding. All these arrests are proof that the system is not working as intended.
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We must note, too, that these are just three stories that we know about. The historic chaos and lawlessness of Biden’s border means that there are certainly many more cases of suspected terrorists and other illegal aliens with bad intentions or criminal backgrounds, who were allowed to go free into the heartland of the country after being apprehended by border agents – or who were never caught in the first place.
Make no mistake: these three examples are the tip of the iceberg, with the exact size of the submerged mass very much undetectable.
These are three stories that ultimately went well for the country – at least in the result. No one knows, though, what these men might have been planning or doing in the interim between their entry into the United States and their later arrests.
It is also painfully clear now that the intelligence and security apparatuses of our federal government are broken and contributing to suspected terrorists walking free into American communities after being processed by law enforcement. These are not simple mistakes that the administration is cleaning up; these are potentially life-or-death scenarios that are occurring because of a lack of organization, communication, and competent leadership across all levels of the pertinent agencies.
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The first duty of our government is to protect its citizens. Unfortunately, the American people should have no faith whatsoever that the Biden-led executive branch is even trying what is remotely necessary to safeguard families and communities.
Republicans in the House of Representatives are doing everything we can to defend the rule of law and to hold the president and members of his team accountable for their dereliction of duty, but we can only do so much. We hope that this nation doesn’t have to face a horrific incident to learn from the incompetence and enabling of lawlessness from the Biden administration.