Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested a terror suspect from Africa in October a week after he was processed by Border Patrol at the Arizona border, the Daily Wire reported.
ICE agents in New York took the 29-year-old into custody on October 10 just one week after he crossed the southern border near Lukeville, Arizona. According to a statement from ICE, the man is either a “Mauritanian or Senegalese citizen.”
Border Patrol officials processed the man and gave him a “notice to appear as a noncitizen present without admission or parole.” He was released with documentation and told to report to Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) in New York City, ICE said.
Because the unnamed illegal is reportedly wanted by authorities in Senegal for his connection to a terrorist organization, ERO took him into custody.
Kenneth Genalo, the director of ERO’s New York field office said in the statement that noncitizens suspected of engaging in or supporting terrorism “are a direct threat” to national security and “will be expeditiously removed from the United States.
Genalo said his office would “use every tool at our disposal” to keep US citizens safe from those who attempt to “exploit” US immigration laws “to escape justice in other countries.”
The suspect will remain in custody until he is deported, ICE said.
In explaining how a terror suspect could get released on his own recognizance, a source with Border Patrol told Fox News reporter Bill Melugin that when Border Patrol checks of a border crosser “comes up negative,” it is assumed that he is clear. If subsequent information “developed through another source,” like biometric searches or an attaché, is later uncovered, it gets uploaded to a shared database.
The source said Border Patrol does not “have the luxury of sitting on these folks for weeks.”
