Almost anything that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) says or does tends to draw lightning from dismissive political opponents on the aisle’s other side. So too did her “Special Interest Alien Reporting Act” that just advanced in the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee. Her bill would require the Department of Homeland Security to start sharing with Americans on a public website, for the first time, the damagingly long-held state secret of how many special interest aliens (SIAs) – aliens from countries where Islamic terrorist organizations operate – are illegally crossing the border each month and their countries of origin.
But whatever guff Green is catching, she’s on to an important issue here that deserves respectful bipartisan consideration by her opponents and support from many more of her natural allies as this nascent piece of legislation survives to move forward.
I say this and suggest an amendment or two below as the author of the only published book about Special Interest Aliens (SIAs), America’s Covert Border War, the Untold Story of the Nation’s Battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration (Bombardier Books, March 2021), and of the recent three-part reportorial “First Blood” series about the recent confirmed terror attack by an SIA border crosser from Mauritania who struck in Chicago just this past October as a result of a problem Green’s bill would fix. I’ve also testified before Congress about the SIA matter.
What this is all about
To briefly reiterate, SIAs are not confirmed terrorists, just a kind of official government tag that DHS agents on the border and in ICE detention centers pin on foreign national strangers who illegally cross land borders if they hail from a U.S. intelligence community list of countries where Islamic terrorist organizations operate. Since at least 2004 – and by the way, in compliance with post-9/11 federal legislation and agency strategy plans – the SIA tag has spurred detention facility agents to conduct secondary face-to-face inspection interviews and mount other efforts to detect signs of involvement or sympathy with terrorist organizations, or deception about those matters that can jumpstart other preventative actions. (See: Terrorist Infiltration Threat at the Southwest Border, Center for Immigration Studies backgrounder August 2018)
In this way, DHS agents in ICE detention facilities for years screened most of the 3,000 or 4,000 SIAs that historically crossed the borders per year before Biden, and they far too often sussed out and removed real terrorists before they could be released into the country. Saving lives.
Democrat presidents, most pointedly Barack Obama’s DHS, whose Secretary Jeh Johnson had ordered up a major SIA program enhancement, have always maintained this hidden protocol, as I have documented in my book and writings over the years. (See, for instance: Trump and the GOP Were Hardly the First to Worry About ‘Special Interest Alien’ Smuggling to the Southwest Border, January 2019)
The program was firing on most of its pistons all these years until President Biden began his term with mass-release policies. These policies drew so many illegal immigrants from SIA countries that the program came to a shuddering halt for the first time. Agents could not possibly interview and screen any but a minuscule fraction, if that. The Biden administration, still inexplicably, didn’t seem to care even when FBI-watchlisted SIA terrorists were netted in record-breaking numbers, many accidentally released.
This troubling truth of what happened there has largely escaped American public absorption or enough congressional oversight, in part because the whole counterterrorism SIA screening program – its many past successes and its many recent failures – was kept secret for decades. The only clue as to the extent of a massive surge of unscreened SIAs and accidental terror watch list releases came to us from conservative press leaks and a Republican-controlled House committee. These were derisively dismissed as political fearmongering and never caught traction.
And although Green hasn’t mentioned Sidi Mohammad Abdallahi – and should at every opportunity if her bill progresses, as it warrants – my reporting strongly indicates his “first blood” October 26 terror attack on Chicago’s orthodox Jewish community happened precisely because Border Patrol was too swamped with SIAs to screen him when the Mauritanian SIA crossed from Tijuana in March 2023 during an especially high swell of illegal immigration.
Breaking the state secret convention
DHS has always treated the number of SIA crossings, the changing SIA countries list, and how many screenings it conducts as big state secrets; we only know from press leaks that their numbers spiked from a few thousand a year before Biden to hundreds of thousands during the Biden term.
So swamped did Border Patrol become with SIAs during the Biden years, in fact, that agents accidentally released SIAs who were on the FBI’s terrorism watch list during his border crisis, leading to panicky manhunts across the nation to reel them back in. (See: Chronic Counter-Terrorism Lapses at the Border, September 2024). Too few knew enough to politically force a stop to this on national security grounds, even after the Abdallahi attack in Chicago and some mainstream media reporting about a major FBI counterterrorism wiretap investigation that swept up eight Tajikistani SIAs in three states.
So many SIAs are still in the country that President Trump 2.0 signed an executive order requiring that they all be tracked down and belatedly screened for terrorism, a tough climb.
Green’s H.R. 275 bill as it currently stands is a welcome first step to resolving all this by finally inviting the general public under the tent. It would require the Department of Homeland Security to publicly report each month how many SIAs have tried to unlawfully enter the United States, and their nationalities or countries of last residence.
This is important because publication of that number will finally enable citizens, lawmakers, journalists and anyone else to ask whether the government is screening all SIAs to make sure no other Abdallahis are making it in. Maybe the bill could make asking that unnecessary.
Room for improvement
The bill could do that by requiring DHS to also report the percentages of SIAs who underwent formal security screenings and how many did not; I know that number is internally recorded and tracked by ICE.
Green might consider adding a further provision that requires DHS to report how many SIA countries are on the U.S. intelligence community’s main “countries of interest” list, since the number changes to account for threat landscapes that change over time and would help the public account for other reasons why SIA numbers go up or down. (I’ve seen lists as high as 54 and as low as 21).
And, perhaps aiming high here, maybe Green’s bill could require reporting on how many of those screened had derogatory information about them sufficient to warrant (unspecified on purpose) further government action.
Democrats, return home
None of this is asking too much, either, or risks operational security. In 2022, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s statistics page website began publishing how many FBI-watchlisted suspected terrorists were getting caught at the border each month. (See: U.S. Government Now Publishing Terrorist Watch List Encounters at American Land Ports, CIS April 2022)
Democrats on the Homeland Security Committee have pushed back on Green’s bill, perhaps because she’s been a lightning rod and tireless Trump gal. But those are not reasons enough to oppose this one.
The idea here is to help the American people make sure future presidents of either party can’t ever again allow swamping numbers of SIAs to cross or to allow any SIAs to cross sans those crucial screenings that have prevented many terror attacks over the years until Biden’s 2021 term let Abdallahi in to shoot at Jews in Chicago.
Ask Obama and his former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson if they believe this SIA matter qualifies as one of those rare ones that Democrats and Republicans can all get behind. Their record fairly screams that, yes it does.