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Democrats don’t want you to know about the suspected terrorist the Biden administration released at the southern border. Mind you, the terrorist was in custody, and Biden’s administration let him walk out the door. His name is Isaam Bazzi, and Republicans are trying to understand why the Lebanese-born suspected terrorist now hailing from the failed socialist state of Venezuela was allowed to go free. The Federalist’s Todd Bensman writes:
AUSTIN, Texas –On Feb. 16, Republican Congress members asked House Democrats for permission to hold a hearing about a decision to release a suspected Islamist terrorist who in November swam the Rio Grande into Texas.
Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., ranking member of the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, penned the request to subcommittee Chair Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, in part on grounds that “There is no known case in which a foreign national who pinged on a terror watch list was simply released on his own recognizance. The facts in the case strongly suggest that the Biden Administration failed to follow appropriate protocols with respect to suspected terrorists.”
Eight GOP lawmakers on the subcommittee signed the letter. But it appears House Democrats are not as interested. An aide in the congressman’s office said they’ve heard nothing: “They’re ignoring us.” Two of my own emailed requests to Lee’s spokesperson went unanswered.
The silent treatment should come as no surprise in this era of sharp partisanship. The GOP co-signatories probably understood this when they sent the letter. But they had to send it anyway because the case at the root of this partisan kerfuffle is too serious for stupid swordsmanship. This one deserves a real hearing, perhaps an inspector general investigation, and media inquiry as the objectively non-partisan homeland security matter this is.
The case of Lebanon-born Venezuelan Issam Bazzi’s release into the American interior is just the latest such incident that raises serious questions. Chief among them is whether the historic mass-migration crisis at the U.S. southern border has seriously degraded national security.
How This Terrorist Suspect Was Set Free
Bazzi was among a swell of Venezuelans who began crossing the Rio Grande in escalating numbers last November on word that the United States was handing out free passes into the interior. Some 25,000 turned themselves in at the border in December and another 22,000 did in January. According to leaked Department of Homeland Security documents in my possession, Bazzi flew with his wife and daughter to Monterrey, Mexico, in early November, then swam the river into Brownsville, Texas.
His name and fingerprints flagged him as on the FBI’s terrorism watch list, so a mistaken identity is unlikely. In the lexicon of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Bazzi is described in the documents as a “Category 5 group member,” which can mean not considered armed and dangerous. But one of the government documents noted Bazzi’s file “contains substantive high side derogatory information.”
As I explain in my book, “America’s Covert Border War,” danger level is irrelevant for what is supposed to happen with any border-crossing terrorist group member on the FBI’s watch list. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website notes that “generally, any individual who is a member of a ‘terrorist organization’ … is ‘inadmissible and is ineligible for most immigration benefits.”
FBI agents operating in line with established post-9/11 protocols interrogate watch-listed migrants and others from countries of national security interest who cross the southern border and end up in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers. That happened when Bazzi was flagged as a suspected terrorist in Brownsville, Texas, after his crossing. But then the process went off the rails.
After interviewing Bazzi, the FBI cited “highly derogatory information” in deciding he was a flight risk and recommended ICE keep the 50-year-old Venezuelan in custody. Typically, migrants suspected of terrorism are deported to their home countries, even if they have no “highly derogatory” intelligence information on their records and don’t pose a flight risk, as the FBI said of Bazzi.
Granted, the United States could not have deported Bazzi to Venezuela because of American diplomatic estrangement with the Nicolas Madura regime. But DHS would have known that the Biden administration was working on an agreement with Colombia to air-deport Venezuelan border-jumpers there. Starting January 31, the United States began deporting Venezuelans to Colombia under that agreement.
But Bazzi was not in custody for that to happen. Something so far off the grid as to defy belief happened instead. ICE headquarters in Washington D.C. ordered Bazzi released into the United States on his own recognizance to pursue an asylum claim in Michigan, where he had family, according to the DHS documents.
Read more here.
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