FAIR Alerts Congress to the Rising Terror Threat: Reaches “Whole Other Level” Administration Placing Safety and Security at Risk

In Fiscal Year 2023, record numbers of individuals on the FBI’s terror watch list were encountered attempting to enter the United States. Those are just the people we know about. Sources tell us that potential terrorists may not be on the watch list, and at least 1.7 million ‘gotaways’ have successfully entered the United States since President Biden took office. We must assume some national security risks are among those 1.7 millions who just snuck across.

While FAIR has been sounding the alarm about the deteriorating security situation, only FBI Director Christopher Wray is willing to confirm the risk to Congress in formal hearings. Testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on November 1, Wray stated: “The reality is that the terrorism threat has been elevated throughout 2023, but the ongoing war in the Middle East has raised the threat of an attack against Americans in the United States to a whole other level,” he warned.

FAIR has been pressing for a greater administration response to this heightened terror threat.

That same day as Wray’s testimony, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei affirmed that striking against the U.S. is very much on the minds of officials in Tehran.

Khamenei’s tweet was only the latest overt threat by Iran and its proxy terrorist groups around the world.

Iran has also been showing extreme interest in nations in our hemisphere, particularly those that have been sending large numbers of migrants to the United States over the past few years. In June, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi paid a visit to three Latin American Marxist dictatorships: Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela – not coincidentally three out of the four nations for which the Biden administration had recently established illegal parole programs. (They continue to add others.) Particularly concerning, the Maduro regime in Venezuela has been issuing Venezuelan passports to Syrian and Lebanese nationals since 2017, while the Biden administration’s policy is to honor all Venezuelan passports for the purposes of parole, even those that are expired.

Given the seriousness of the threats to our homeland security, we are pressing the Secretary of Homeland Security to direct the agencies under his command to seal our borders and make a full-scale effort to locate potential terror threats who have already made it into the United States. That did not seem to be the case when Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified before the same Senate committee one day before Director Wray. (Here at FAIR, we have now coined a non-responsive answer as “a Mayorkas response.”)

When asked point-blank by Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), “Approximately how many illegal aliens in this country or here on asylum have direct ties to Hamas, to Hezbollah, to the Islamic Jihad or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran?”, Mayorkas could not provide even a vague estimate. In fact, in typical Mayorkas fashion, his reply to the very serious question posed by the senator was “mystery meat and a lot of baloney”: “Senator Marshall, let me assure you that individuals that pose a risk to our national security are our highest enforcement priority, the safety and security of the American public.”

Sen. Marshall was not reassured by that reply and neither are we as we face the most serious threats to our homeland since 9/11. FAIR will continue to sound the alarm in the Halls of Congress and coordinate with law enforcement as the security situation continues to threaten communities nationwide.