AUSTIN, Texas — With an immigrant terrorism scare far from the U.S.-Mexico border, North Carolina now officially joins the no longer very exclusive “every-state-is-a-border state” club.
An immigrant from Yemen in North Carolina’s rural northwest Gates County began firing a rifle outside a Carolina Quick Stop store in the small town of Eure, then attacked responding Gates County Sheriff’s deputies and barricaded himself in a four-hour standoff with them. After the eventual arrest on assault and weapons charges, Sheriff Ray Campbell reported that Awet Hagos of Yemen was on the FBI’s terrorism watch list and that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) wanted him on an arrest warrant “detainer.”
Only after all this did ICE run fingerprints and find that Hagos was on the terror watch list and had somehow made his way to Haiti and, from there, the United States. He’d been living in the area for six months, the sheriff later told local news, apparently sponsored by the Quick Stop store owner.
I have been unable to independently confirm that Hagos is watch-listed, and the name Hagos is commonly associated with nationals in Eritrea and Ethiopia, although populations of both countries do also reside in Yemen.
This entire circumstance demands a public inquiry and far more national attention.
“The Gates County Sheriff’s Office currently has only 12 deputies, yet they find themselves dealing with a violent illegal immigrant their own national security [databases] have flagged as a potential terrorist threat,” Robinson said at the March 18 conference. “I call on President Biden to give immediate answers. How did Hagos enter the United States? How did Hagos get to North Carolina? Are there other places he’s been in our state he’s traveled to or through, and should those areas be on heightened alert?”
To be sure, Robinson would no doubt like to catch the border crisis wind in his candidacy sail. Polling clearly shows the crisis that has brought millions of illegal immigrants to settle in every corner of the United States often ranks as the highest voter concern of the 2024 election, a deeply negative factor for Democrats.
Nonpartisan homeland security experts say the threat of infiltration by anyone associated with terrorism ideologies through our vulnerable border management infrastructure is severe. The Biden administration’s own 2024 Homeland Threat Assessment warns on page 12 that “terrorists may exploit the elevated flow and increasingly complex security environment to enter the United States.
Since the border crisis began on Inauguration Day 2021, Border Patrol has logged the apprehensions of 340 watch-listed immigrant terror suspects who illegally crossed the southern border, while a record-breaking 2 million so-called “got-aways” escaped apprehension to live inside the country, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection website reports.
In his latest testimony to Congress about what he regards as a rising terrorist 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
Just this March, a Lebanese immigrant on the FBI watch list who crossed from Juarez to El Paso confessed to medical personnel, not federal agents, that Hezbollah had sent him to build a bomb in New York. It seems that Basel Bassel Ebbadi was on track to be freed had he not tried to ingratiate himself with a voluntary confession to untrained personnel
In 2022, Border Patrol waved through a watch-listed Somali member of the al-Shabaab terrorist group near San Diego. He was free to do damage for most of a year before authorities untangled their mistake and picked him up in Minneapolis.
There was the release of a dangerous FBI watch-listed terror suspect, a Lebanon-born Venezuelan who crossed into Brownsville but was cut loose on orders from Washington despite ardent FBI protests that he remain in detention.
This case also raises the question Robinson asks, from either side of the aisle: How did Hagos get from Haiti to the United States? Did the administration authorize him to fly from Haiti directly into the United States as part of its secretive humanitarian parole “flights” program, the same one that allowed a now-accused Haitian child rapist to fly into New York’s JFK airport?
Obey
Article URL : https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/21/how-did-a-yemeni-migrant-on-the-fbis-terrorist-watch-list-get-to-north-carolina/