Published April 22, 2024 by the Claremont Institute’s The American Mind

Author: Todd Bensman

The latest release into the American interior of an FBI terrorist suspect who illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border—a twice-freed Afghan national man free to roam America for 11 months until his capture—demands that the federal government regard this patterned problem as a chronic national security emergency requiring elevation to the highest priority within the intelligence community, federal law enforcement, and Congress.

The case of the 48-year-old Mohammad Kharwin, whom an overwhelmed Border Patrol freed into America on March 10, 2023 before agents could confirm the FBI watch list hit that initially flagged him and whom a swamped Texas immigration court freed a second time in February, is the seventh example of its kind that can establish, just from disparate public records, a mortally dangerous failure pattern.

More cases of accidental Border Patrol releases of illegally crossing terrorism suspects, who did not reach the public record, are highly likely if not certain.

But this latest miss-and-release propels the problem well beyond the critical mass threshold justifying coordinated high-priority government intervention, even if Congress must politically force it, before the next one—or those still roaming the country lost to authorities even now—needlessly kill and maim Americans.

By current public accounts, an initial Border Patrol database check flagged Kharwin for membership in Hezb-e-Islami, which the U.S. Director of National Intelligence describes as a “virulently anti-Western insurgent group,” when he illegally crossed the California border in March 2023. He was among 23,286 illegal aliens caught crossing that month in what would turn out to be a record-breaking year for the agency’s San Diego Border Sector. All told, there were 230,941 illegal crossers caught in 2023, up nearly 60,000 from 2022 and 90,000 more than 2021.

That extraordinary traffic no doubt strained all normal Border Patrol counterterrorism and vetting processes.

Instead of keeping Kharwin detained as a “special interest alien,” tagged until standard face-to-face interviews and corroboration of the initial hit was complete, Border Patrol agents under orders from Washington, D.C. waved him through like millions of other illegal crossers on “Alternatives to Detention” (ATD) personal recognizance papers, where they agree to voluntarily report later to ICE in a city of their choice.

​NBC reports that Border Patrol never even informed ICE of the initial FBI watch list flagging; that’s evidently how the same collapsed border management system missed a second opportunity to catch Kharwin in late January of this year, when he showed up before an immigration judge in a Pearsall, Texas, ICE detention facility for a hearing. Perhaps because ICE still didn’t have the initial terrorism flag hit, that agency’s court lawyer representative did not report it to the judge, or appeal, when Kharwin was ordered released on $12,000 bond for a distant 2025 hearing.

“The judge placed no restrictions on his movements inside the U.S.” in the meantime, NBC reported.

Somehow, the FBI figured all of this out and got word to ICE agents to find and arrest Kharwin, which they did a month later, on February 28, in nearby San Antonio.

An Established New National Security Threat Pattern

Terrorism threat border lights have been blinking red for some time now in a non-specific way, especially since the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency in March 2022 began publishing “Terrorist Screening Data Set Encounters” by the month on its public-facing website. Those began breaking all national records when the Biden government took office in January 2021, when apprehended illegal border crossers on the FBI watch list ballooned from three during Trump’s last fiscal year in office to 15, then by another 98 in fiscal 2022, then 169 in fiscal 2023, and another 75 so far in fiscal 2024.

Through March 2024, Border Patrol caught 342 while partnered federal agencies like the FBI and ICE intelligence presumably investigated and dealt with each. That they did so is less a good national security story than an unacceptable sampling of much bigger flows of watch-listed illegal aliens coming into America who are not caught and handled. If some two million of these so-called “got-aways” went through since 2021 (like Kharwin evidently tried to), more suspected terrorists on the FBI watch list are almost certainly among them.

But short of vastly reducing the millions-per-year border crossings by restoring former president Donald Trump’s discarded policies, the Biden Administration could at least be forced to triple down on its counterterrorism resources at the southern border.

In recent months, the terrorism threat at the border has generated some public concern, but never explicitly about the preventable accidental releases of terrorist suspects authorities later had to chase down.

In September 2023, for instance, I testified before the U.S. House Subcommittee on the Judiciary about the accidental releases I knew about at the time. Mine was indeed a rare warning that named the accidental-release problem in juxtaposition with my 2021 book America’s Covert Border War, which revealed counterterrorism programs at the border that have kept the nation safe from infiltrated attacks for nearly 20 years. I told the members that Biden’s border crisis had severely compromised those old programs, caused a spate of accidental terror suspect releases, and elevated the threat of terror attack as a result.

The Biden Administration’s own 2024 Homeland Threat Assessment warns, with far less specificity, that “terrorists may exploit the elevated flow and increasingly complex security environment to enter the United States” and that “individuals with potential terrorism connections continue to attempt to enter the Homeland illegally between ports of entry…via the southern border.”

With even less specificity, in his latest testimony to Congress about what he regards as a rising terrorist border infiltration threat, FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that a “wide array of very dangerous threats…emanate from” the southwest border, including the designated terror group ISIS.

Despite the variably specific warnings about the border infiltration threat, the ever-growing number of known accidental-release cases like Kharwin’s and the ones I told the subcommittee about remain broadly unrecognized as the unique emerging threat problem these cases indicate. Probably because no one has been killed yet as a consequence, few federal agencies or homeland security committee lawmakers seem interested in calling it out.

Case Candidates for Investigation

To date, only one federal investigation has produced a public report branding the problem, remarkable but forgotten or given short shrift by major U.S. news media, although I did write about it. That eye-opening document was the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general’s office report about the April 19, 2022 crossing and mistaken release of a Colombian on the FBI watch list. ICE agents were not able to track him down to Florida for two long weeks.

Its key finding was that Border Patrol and ICE agents couldn’t do normal counterterrorism protocols because they were simply too “busy processing an increased flow of migrants.”

But these six other cases qualify as investigation-worthy:

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Brian Giesbrecht

Are candid questions about border security and immigration really semi-racist, or are they legitimate self protection? Are questions about unchecked people entering our countries from parts of the world where Islamists have great influence “Islamophobia”, or are such questions perfectly understandable given the Islamist-inspired attacks that occur with regularity around the globe?

The shocking terrorist attack that took place on March 22, 2024 near Moscow is still reverberating around the globe. Exactly who was responsible for the attack and why it happened is not completely clear. One of the many Islamist terrorist factions, IS Khorason Province, has taken “credit” for the bloody massacre, but the details are murky. To add to the murk the videos that have emerged showing large powerful shooters that some say stand in stark contrast to the videos showing smaller and less robust Tajik suspects confessing to being the shooters. So, conspiracy theories are flying.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin seems intent on trying to blame Ukraine, but that is entirely predictable. Everything Putin says is now taken with a grain of salt by the international community. Ukraine does not appear to be connected. What is known is that Putin was warned recently by the U.S. that exactly such an attack was in the works, but angrily blew off the warning as American propaganda. How Russians will react to this information -or even if they will find out about it – is not known. We don’t know much more than that at this time. Hopefully the details will become clearer with the passage of time.

However, two facts about the incident that do appear to be reasonably certain are that the perpetrators were not Russians, and that the attack was related to an Islamist terror group that hates Russia – and apparently everyone else that does not share their philosophy.

That definitely includes Canada. Should we worry about such an attack taking place here?

At one time the answer would be “probably not”. Canada was a nation with a sophisticated, well-regulated immigration system that weeded out potential terrorists, and tightly controlled borders. A dangerous person might still get in, but chances are that even if he did his movements would be monitored, and he would be stopped before committing an atrocity. But not anymore.

This all changed when Justin Trudeau became prime minister in 2015. Canadians were mystified when he told the New York Times that Canada was a “post national state”. What did he mean?

What he meant began to become clear when he sent out his famous January, 2017 tweet basically inviting any global resident who cared to come to Canada – no questions asked.

“To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada,’

And thousands did. Roxham Road became internationally famous as a pleasant lane where any global resident with the wherewithal to fly to the United States could get a cab to Roxham Road, and simply walk into Canada. They would then agree to show up at an immigration hearing they had no intention of attending. And that would be it. They would stay as long as they liked.

Canadians began to understand the implications of being a “post-national state”. Because does such an entity as a “post-national state” even need borders, border guards, border security – or even an army, for that matter? Aren’t concerns about terrorists getting into your country rather silly now if Canada had apparently evolved past that outdated “nation state” stage? And why even be concerned with how many people were entering the country if borders weren’t really relevant any longer?

So people came. Anyone who raised questions about this radical new philosophy was branded as something akin to a racist or white supremacist. Or, worst of all – “like Donald Trump”, who had famously questioned the wisdom of allowing free entry into the U.S. of people from countries where Islamist philosophy prevails.

This worked. The Conservatives were thoroughly intimidated. So they basically remained silent, while millions of immigrants and foreign “students” flooded into the country, with little in the way of background checks.

In recent years the number of people coming into Canada as asylum seekers, foreign students, or immigrants in other categories has been astounding. Last year alone, Canada had an additional 550,000 immigrants, but more than 1,000,000 foreign students.

These are staggering numbers. Most of these people are probably peaceful and productive people. But how many of them are not? How many of the million “students”, for example, might have ties to the same Islamic terrorist group that terrorized Moscow?

The fact is that we don’t know. The numbers coming in are too great. They are coming in too fast. And they are not being properly checked. The frightening reality is that if even a tiny fraction of these virtually unchecked people are terrorists Canada could see tragedy unfold any day of the week.

Many of these foreign students appear to be involved in the lawless and shockingly antisemitic protests, now occurring daily in public places, and even in Jewish neighborhoods – sometimes directly in front of synagogues! In January, 2024 National Post commented on this frightening phenomenon:

“In recent months, we have witnessed a critical mass of antisemitic Canadians willing to vandalize Jewish businesses, protest relentlessly for a Palestinian nation-state “from the river to the sea” and even threaten police officers with death.”

The Post notes that most of the most violent protests appear to involve new immigrants and foreign students from Muslim nations. It would be a slur on these people to suggest that they are tied to an Islamist terrorist group, like the IS-K group claiming responsibility for the deadly rampage in Moscow. And yet, Canadians who are witnessing this alarming antisemitism have a right to know with whom they are sharing their country. That is the right of every citizen.

Our neighbours to the south are worried about terrorism as well. Millions of unchecked migrants have simply walked into Texas, Arizona and California since 2020. If even a tiny fraction of these unchecked migrants are terrorists there will be major trouble ahead. Recently, Christopher Wray, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has warned about the likelihood of a terror attack occurring because of these lax or completely absent border controls.

Britain, and all of Europe are also beginning to realize that the almost unrestricted, and unregulated immigration into their countries is placing them at great risk. Because of these understandable concerns the unwritten taboo about citizens asking candid questions about the backgrounds of newcomers to their countries is starting to break down. Simply put, people don’t want terrorists entering their countries.

That includes citizens of Russia. We don’t know how events will play out in Moscow. Is this just the first of many similar attacks in Moscow and elsewhere, or is it just a one-off?

But perhaps it will get us all thinking more clearly. Are candid questions about border security and immigration really semi-racist, or are they legitimate self protection? Are questions about unchecked people entering our countries from parts of the world where Islamists have great influence “Islamophobia”, or are such questions perfectly understandable given the Islamist-inspired attacks that occur with regularity around the globe? Should we continue to write off any political party that dares ask these questions as “far-right” or “anti-immigrant” or should we listen to the questions that they raise and take these concerns seriously?

Ordinary citizens throughout the western world are starting to wake up and realize that it is not racist, or “far right”, to demand to know who is being let into our countries. We all want peaceful, productive immigrants who share our basic values. But we have the right to know that is who they are before we let them in. Who we allow into our country is of vital importance to us, and we should not be afraid to say so. We have a right to expect that our borders are secure.

Perhaps at some stage in human evolution borders will no longer be necessary, because we will all be living in some peaceful, post-national state. But until that glorious day comes, we need secure borders, and we need to have good information about anyone who wants to cross them.

Brian Giesbrecht, retired judge, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy