Mexico-born Miguel Alejandro Santana, aka "Muhammad Khalid Mikaeel Khattab", held a lawful permanent resident green card and lived in Upland, Calif., near Los Angeles.
An application by Santana for U.S. citizenship, although its exact filing date could not be determined, likely was pending while, or fairly soon after, Santana radicalized in August 2010. That happened when Santana met Afghanistan-born naturalized U.S. citizen Sohiel Omar Kabir in a hookah bar. Kabir influenced Santana to convert to Islam and to embrace radical and violent doctrines, an FBI complaint affidavit later alleged.
The application was already pending in January 2012, when the FBI launched an investigation after receiving information entirely unrelated to the citizenship application process. However long they had between Santana’s reported radicalization in August 2010 until the FBI investigation began in January 2012, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reviewers were not the ones to discover his disqualifying activities, such as prolific online postings regaling violent jihad action and ideology on public social media.
“Since the time he converted” in August 2010, Santana physically trained, financially prepared, and recruited two other converts to travel with him to join Kabir in the Taliban and al-Qaeda so that they could kill American troops in the service of jihad, the FBI complaint stated. Kabir did enter Afghanistan in July 2012 and prepared the way for Santana and the others to follow. Long before then, Santana was prolifically posting violent extremist literature and messages on his social media.
Instead of a USCIS security screening discovery of any of this, the FBI began its investigation because of a January 2012 encounter between Santana and a customs inspections officer at the San Ysidro Port of Entry. Santana was returning from terrorism-related firearms training in Mexico, carrying al-Qaeda’s Inspire propaganda magazine. Santana told the customs officer that he had converted to Islam and downloaded the magazine to have reading material. The incident was referred to the FBI, which then mounted the terrorism investigation that involved having a paid undercover informant approach Santana online the following month to gauge whether he posed a threat.
They did after Santana told the FBI informant that he had gone to Mexico to train in firearms and had followed an article in the Inspire magazine to practice building explosives, “learning how to use and make them”. He said he planned to become a sniper for his part in the jihad.
By September 2012, plans were well underway with Kabir overseas for Santana and two other California associates to get to Afghanistan circuitously by way of Mexico. Still without citizenship that would enable him to secure an American passport, Santana renewed his Mexican passport at a Mexican consulate in the U.S. for the trip.
On November 16, as the group was driving to the Mexican border for already-purchased flights out of Mexico City, the FBI arrested them.
After a trial in March 2015, a federal judge sentenced Santana to 10 years in prison on a conviction for conspiring to provide support to foreign terrorist groups.