Database: National Security Vetting Failures

Bosnia-born Abdullah Ramo Pazara became a naturalized U.S. citizen on May 17, 2013 and, 11 days after swearing his oath of allegiance in St. Louis, Mo., departed America to join the jihad in Syria and was soon serving a mortal U.S. enemy, the Islamic State. Pazara became commander of an Islamic State tank battalion and later died in fighting.

Adjudicators at Missouri’s USCIS field office clearly had not noticed that Pazara, who worked as a long-haul truck driver, was already established as a radicalized jihadist before granting him citizenship, although a different, more robust kind of security vetting might easily have turned up evidence of this among friends, family, and perhaps a foreign government or even Pazara himself.

But aside from the dedication to violent anti-American jihad, a distant prior job in his country of origin likely would have derailed Pazara’s 2013 bid for U.S. citizenship had an earlier generation of government reviewers dug deep enough to learn of it: Back in Bosnia during the early 1990s, before Pazara converted to Islam, he served as a sniper with a rapacious Serbian militia during the former Yugoslavia’s brutal civil war, killing and ethnically cleansing Bosnian Muslims, according to media reports.

Those reviewing his refugee application during the pre-9/11 era might be forgiven for not discerning a deeply disqualifying personal history as an ethnic-cleansing Serb sniper in that war. But those conducting his background check in the supposedly more vigilant and technologically advanced post-9/11 era clearly also did not find it before granting citizenship, nor the jihadist commitment that had him departing 11 days after receiving it to join ISIS.

Evidence that came out later pegs Pazara’s radicalization to about 2011 when he began associating with Bosnia-born Nihad Rosic, also a truck driver whose family had been close friends to the Pazarro family back in Bosnia. Pazara met Nihad Rosic during a truck driving trip to Utica, N.Y., where Rosic lived. Afterward, the men developed a close bond and frequently contacted each other on social media. According to Rosic’s attorney, Rosic “turned a corner” in terms of his religiosity around 2011, the same time that Pazara also adopted radical religious beliefs.

One clue for citizenship application reviewers that something unusual was afoot was that Pazara had legally changed his name to “Abdullah” Ramo Pazara. The brochure for the naturalization ceremony he attended reflects the official name change.

The FBI learned of Pazara’s whereabouts as part of an investigation into six Bosnian immigrants in the United States, including Pazara’s friend Rosic, for allegedly sending money, rifle scopes, knives, military equipment, and other supplies to Pazara through intermediaries in Bosnia and Turkey. All were indicted in February 2015 on various terrorism charges (most had immigrated as refugees while still children many years earlier).

In March 2014, according to the indictment, the FBI found that Pazara recounted to an unnamed individual in the United States a mission in which his tank battalion took control of a large area, killed 11 opposing soldiers, and captured one prisoner. Pazara stated that he intended to slaughter the prisoner the next day. Video surfaced of Pazara’s battalion killing five soldiers, one by beheading.

In May 2014, Pazara uploaded a photo album of dead combatants from the Kurdish militias, who were fighting for a state within Syria and who had been killed fighting Pazara’s battalion. “These kafirs [nonbelievers] of the PKK [the Kurdistan Workers’ Party] … with Allah’s help, were killed during the last military action fighting against the Islamic State,” Pazara proclaimed online. “This is what is waiting for them in the world, these infidels in the trenches were killed one by one fleeing their homes.” One of the dead fighters was wearing a Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt, and Pazara quipped that, despite their designer apparel, “they didn’t have any footwear, Allahu Akbar.”

Pazara was killed in action in September 2014.

Somalia-born Abdul Razak Ali Artan entered the United States with his mother and seven siblings in June 2014, about one year after applying for refugee status in a Pakistani refugee camp, where the family had been living for about seven years. He was about 18 years old when the family arrived in the United States and settled in Columbus, Ohio. During the period of 2013-June 2014, when the family was still in Pakistan and its refugee status application was under review, USCIS would have had ample time to conduct security vetting, interviews, and any necessary investigation.

Instead, some two-and-a-half years after the family’s arrival as refugees, on November 28, 2016, a campus police officer shot and killed Artan after Artan used a Honda Civic and a butcher knife to attack fellow students, injuring 11, on the Ohio State University campus.

FBI officials later decided Artan was motivated by the ideology of violent jihadism. Court records and reporting offer no timeline of precisely when Artan radicalized, but a reasonable presumption is that he was already radicalized in the Pakistani camp. Immediately following the attack, ISIS issued a statement describing Artan as a “soldier”. Facebook postings prior to the attack showed Artan was angry over the Burmese military government reprisals against militant Rohinga Muslims in October 2016, the month before Artan's attack. Investigators looked into a message posted on Facebook by Artan that contained inflammatory statements about being “sick and tired” of seeing Muslims killed and reaching a “boiling point”, a law enforcement source said.

“Stop the killing of the Muslims in Burma,” Artan said in the Facebook post, in which he also called Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born radical cleric linked to al-Qaeda’s Yemen franchise, “a hero”.

Still, while it was unclear whether USCIS refugee application vetting in Pakistan might have discovered Artan’s radicalization in 2013-or 2014, a post-attack Senate Judiciary Committee investigation under the leadership of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) concluded that security screeners in Pakistan did not properly vet Artan while he was overseas and under consideration for the refugee grant during 2013.

According to a letter to DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson summarizing the committee’s findings, Sen. Grassley wrote that Artan’s mother’s claims that she feared persecution from the Somali terrorist group al-Shabbab should have triggered deeper questioning of her older children, including Artan. Grassley wrote that his investigation found such questioning never happened, citing immigration records his committee obtained from a whistleblower.

“Further questioning could have eliminated the possibility that the asylees had dubious ties to the terrorist group and could have allowed for more robust vetting and data collection,” Grassley wrote. “However, although common in these cases, no additional questioning was conducted.”

Somalia-born Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud was only two years old when he immigrated with his parents and siblings to the United States. But years later as a 20-year-old, in 2013, he had fully radicalized as a violent Islamic jihadist and came up with a plan to apply for U.S. citizenship for use in terrorism.

USCIS security screeners that year did not uncover his well-developed extremism or plans in time to reject his application or prevent him from using the fresh American passport he secured with his new citizenship to fight overseas in Syria and to then return with a plot to murder American citizens, for which he was eventually convicted.

According to court records and media accounts much later, Mohamud’s mother brought him and three siblings into the United States in August 1993. The family – including Mohamud and his brother, Abdifatah Aden (“Aden”) – settled in Columbus, Ohio, as lawful permanent residents.

By the time Mohamud decided to apply for citizenship in 2013, both he and Aden were deeply committed to jihad, a later FBI counterterrorism investigation discovered. The brother, Aden, after graduating from Ohio State University, left the United States in May 2013 to fight with the al-Nusra Front in Syria, an al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group. In September of that year, Mohamud pledged to join him but first wanted to secure U.S. citizenship and a passport to facilitate travel and return to conduct a terror attack.

USCIS adjudicators in Ohio quickly approved his citizenship. In February 2014, Mohamud took the oath of citizenship at a naturalization ceremony. A week later, in accordance with his terrorist planning, Mohamud applied for the passport, which he received in March 2014. He also set about coordinating his journey with Aden, pledging to bring his brother $1,000, a communications device for the battlefield, and an internet-accessing device, a government sentencing memorandum stated. In the months before approving Mohamud’s application, USCIS adjudicators of his 2013 application did not notice, if they ever checked, Mohamud’s social media postings such as one directed at his brother overseas that read, in part:  

“In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, Most Merciful. Salam be on you and your blessed companions Al Mujahideen (Arabic for “religious war fighters”) I’m proud of you. ... Allha (Arabic for “God”) loves the simple soldier so be a simple soldier, even if that means that no one knows who you are. All praise is to Allah who has allowed my Brother to fight in his cause. Abdifatah please know that you are fulfilling a glorious act that many of us have failed in, know that everytime you shoot your rifle, you are that much closer to Jannah (Arabic for “heaven” or “paradise”) so shoot and be true to Allah inn Shaa Allah I conclude with a simple piece of advise (sic), be Patient and be Humble, make dua (aninvocation) to Allah to allow me to join you in the high ranks as a Mujahid (Arabic for a person who wages jihad or war) inn Shaa Allah remain, steadfast and think of Allah 24/7. WaSalam love Abdirhaman.”

Mohamud left for Syria in April 2014, using a purposefully deceptive roundabout air and ground route, and went into combat training with the al-Nusra Front. His brother Aden died in fighting in June, probably before they could reunite. While in the combat zone, Mohamud began plotting a terror attack on U.S. soil, predicated on his return a few days after hearing of his brother’s combat death. He returned on June 8, 2014. 

Mohamud liked the idea of conducting an attack on a federal prison facility in the Fort Worth, Texas, area where the notorious terrorist operative Dr. Aafia Siddiqui was being held on an 86-year federal sentence for trying to kill American citizens. At the time, Siddiqui’s conviction and imprisonment had become a rallying point for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The plan was to recruit several other terrorists, gather weapons, and kidnap and kill soldiers and Americans in uniform. At one point, he showed several potential recruits how to fire handguns at a shooting range.

The plot was serious. The FBI arrested Mohamud in November 2015 as he was about to board a flight from Columbus, Ohio, to the Dallas/Fort Worth airport. In January 2018, a judge sentenced Mohamud to 264 months in prison on a guilty plea to various terrorism charges.

In 2013, Ethiopian nationals Mohamed Abdirahman Osman and his wife, Zeinab Abdirahman Mohamad, applied for refugee status at the American embassy in Beijing, China, a city to which they had themselves smuggled from refugee centers in Kenya. In Beijing, the couple found purchase in telling the American embassy that the U.S.-designated terrorist group al-Shabaab had kidnapped the couple and held them hostage in an abandoned milk factory and that he lost his hands and suffered a ruined eye as a victim in an al-Shabaab terror attack. They swore to American adjudicators they were Somalis and were fleeing terrorism and war.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reviewers granted them refugee status, and in February 2014 they settled in Tucson, Ariz. After the requisite one year of provisional residency for refugees, in 2015, they hewed to the same stories when they applied for their lawful permanent residence green cards, which they received after a second security vetting.

But an FBI investigation three years later discovered that almost no part of the stories Mohamed and Zeinab told was true, including even the names they provided (Mustaf Adan Arale was Mohamed’s true name, for instance). According to an August 2018 indictment: The lies covered up that he was actually an Ethiopian who would have been in limited danger in his home country. It seems likely they chose Somalia as a nationality because, due to two decades of anarchy, that country would hold no records that could be checked, whereas Ethiopia does.

Security reviewers missed far more than the basic lies about nationality and identity.

The FBI found that Mohamed was an actual operative of the U.S.-designated terrorist group al-Shabaab that, in their fake persecution stories, supposedly had attacked the couple and their families. In fact, Mohamed blew his hands off and wrecked vision in one eye by mishandling explosives for the terrorist group. Thanks to the fake identities and nationalities, screeners in Beijing and later in Arizona also missed that Mohamed’s brother was an active operative for the terrorist group; and that the couple’s friends and associates are also members of the terrorist group. Zeinab attested on federal papers and in apparently unchallenged USCIS interviews that her husband was someone else from a different country to help cover it all up.

Their story did not begin to unravel until a March 24, 2017, FBI search warrant on the couple’s home yielded certain unspecified "items of property", according to court records. Mohamed told the agents he was worried about the investigation and that he had lied to agents.

Perhaps had adjudicators in Beijing found out the identity and nationality lies, they too would have secured the same admissions that FBI agents did later: That al-Shabaab had recruited Mohamed in his native Ethiopia and sent him to the Somali capital of Mogadishu to serve with other members of the terrorist group. They apparently kept Mohamed busy. In explaining an injury clearly caused by explosive ordinance, Mohamed told USCIS in Tucson that he had been injured in a June 2010 al-Shabaab attack at the Bakara Market in central Mogadishu. News reports he could easily have pulled up on the Internet showed there was such an attack in May 2010 that killed 45 civilians.

But Mohamed admitted to the FBI that he lost his hands in 2009 while handling explosives for al-Shabaab.

Indeed, the couple and their extended families all had been enmeshed with al Shabaab, rather than fleeing the group's wrath as they falsely claimed to American embassy officials and later to U.S. immigration authorities when they applied for citizenship. He and Zeinab omitted the fact that he sent as much as $32,000 to family still active in al-Shabaab, including to a brother after the brother fled as a fugitive following his conviction, along with an uncle and aunt, for carrying out a deadly May 24, 2014, restaurant bombing in Djibouti.

In April 2020, Zeinab and Mohamed pleaded guilty to false swearing on their applications and lying to federal agents at the American embassy in China and, in 2015, on permanent residency applications in Arizona. Both were deported to Jordan.

In 2013, Ethiopian nationals Mohamed Abdirahman Osman and his wife, Zeinab Abdirahman Mohamad, applied for refugee status at the American embassy in Beijing, China, a city to which they had themselves smuggled from refugee centers in Kenya. In Beijing, the couple found purchase in telling the American embassy that the U.S.-designated terrorist group al-Shabaab had kidnapped the couple and held them hostage in an abandoned milk factory and that he lost his hands and suffered a ruined eye as a victim in an al-Shabaab terror attack. They swore to American adjudicators they were Somalis and were fleeing terrorism and war.

USCIS reviewers granted them refugee status and in February 2014 they settled in Tucson, Ariz. After the requisite one year of provisional residency for refugees, in 2015 they hewed to the same stories when they applied for their lawful permanent residence green cards, which they received after a second security vetting.

But an FBI investigation three years later discovered that almost no parts of the stories Mohamed and Zeinab told were true, including even the names they provided (Mustaf Adan Arale was Mohamed’s true name, for instance). According to an August 2018 indictment, the lies covered up that he was actually an Ethiopian who would have been in limited danger in his home country. It seems likely they chose Somalia as a nationality because, due to two decades of anarchy, that country would hold no records that could be checked whereas Ethiopia does.

Security reviewers missed far more than the basic lies about nationality and identity.

The FBI found that Mohamed was an operative of the U.S.-designated terrorist group al-Shabaab that, in their fake persecution stories, supposedly had attacked the couple and their families. In fact, Mohamed blew his hands off and wrecked vision in one eye by mishandling explosives for the terrorist group. Thanks to the fake identities and nationalities, screeners in Beijing and later in Arizona also missed that Mohamed’s brother was an active operative for the terrorist group; and that the couple’s friends and associates are also members of the terrorist group. Zeinab attested on federal papers and in apparently unchallenged USCIS interviews that her husband was someone else from a different country to help cover it all up.

Their story did not begin to unravel until a March 24, 2017, FBI search warrant on the couple’s home yielded certain unspecified "items of property", according to court records. Mohamed told the agents he was worried about the investigation and that he had lied to agents.

Perhaps had adjudicators in Beijing found out the identity and nationality lies they, too, would have secured the same admissions that FBI agents did later: that al-Shabaab had recruited Mohamed in his native Ethiopia and sent him to the Somali capital of Mogadishu to serve with other members of the terrorist group. They apparently kept Mohamed busy. In explaining an injury clearly caused by explosive ordinance, Mohamed told USCIS in Tucson that he had been injured in a June 2010 al-Shabaab attack at the Bakara Market in central Mogadishu. News reports he could easily have pulled up on the Internet showed there was such an attack in May 2010 that killed 45 civilians.

But Mohamed admitted to the FBI that he lost his hands in 2009 while handling explosives for al-Shabaab.

Indeed, the couple and their extended families all had been enmeshed with al-Shabaab, rather than fleeing the group's wrath as they falsely claimed to American embassy officials and later to U.S. immigration authorities as they applied for citizenship. He and Zeinab omitted the fact that he sent as much as $32,000 to family still active in al-Shabaab, including to a brother after the brother fled as a fugitive following his conviction, along with an uncle and aunt, for carrying out a deadly May 24, 2014, restaurant bombing in Djibouti.

In April 2020, Zeinab and Mohamed pleaded guilty to false swearing on their applications and lying to federal agents at the American embassy in China and, in 2015, on permanent residency applications in Arizona. Both were deported to Jordan.

In 2013, Chinese national and marine biologist Shuren Qin invested the requisite minimum of $500,000 to qualify for the EB-5 “immigrant investor program”, which admits foreign investors who are supposed to create U.S. jobs. In November 2014, with a State Department-approved EB-5 visa in hand, the 41-year-old entrepreneur entered the United States with his wife and two young children and settled in Wellesley, Mass., under the program’s conditional permanent residency provision and began running his nine-year-old China-based marine products company, LinkOcean Technologies, LTD.

ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations launched an undercover sting operation against Qin in April 2017 after receiving a tip from the U.S. Defense Security Service when he contacted an American manufacturer of undersea drones.

By June 2018, Qin was arrested and stood federally indicted for having used LinkOcean Technologies throughout 2015 and 2016 to fraudulently funnel export-controlled anti-submarine warfare equipment, such as the undersea drones and underwater listening devices that the U.S. Navy uses, to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the Navy South China Sea Fleet Troop 91388, the PLA Naval Submarine Academy, and other Chinese research institutions that support the Chinese naval warfare branches.

Some of those end-users of the export-controlled equipment Qin sought to funnel included the National University of Defense Technology, the PLA University of Science and Technology, and the Northwestern Polytechnical University, all of which support the Chinese military’s development.

An analysis of court records shows that U.S. State Department EB-5 visa adjudicators in the Bureau of Consular Affairs based in China missed early and easily detectable opportunities to discover Qin’s connection to the Chinese military, which would have deepened a vetting investigation that almost certainly would have uncovered a long client list of Chinese government proxies. In turn, Qin would have been disqualified from receiving an EB-5 visa and damaging U.S. security for 29 months from the time he entered the United States in November 2014 through April 2017, when ICE investigators discovered what he was doing. The clue for State Department adjudicators in China was that LinkOcean Technologies’ public-facing website listed the Chinese military as one of its customers, court records show.

Qin did not remove that customer from his website until 2017, when Customs and Border Protection officers questioned him at an airport as he returned from China and he became aware that he was under investigation, court records show. 

The resulting national security damage was significant. Prosecutors said that from 2015 to 2016, Qin exported 78 hydrophones, devices that can be used to monitor sound underwater, to Northwestern Polytechnical University (NWPU).

Prosecutors said that because of national security risks, the U.S. Commerce Department requires an export license to be obtained to ship U.S. goods to NWPU, which works with the People’s Liberation Army to advance its military capabilities.

Prosecutors said in a sentencing memorandum that Qin’s efforts to illegally smuggle the equipment to Chinese military proxies, usually by elaborately concealing the end users to evade U.S. export and national security controls, “deliberately endangered U.S. national security”. “The national security risks associated with the defendant’s conduct are manifest. The defendant willfully ignored these risks — not to mention federal law — in order to further his business interests and satisfy a ‘VIP’ customer,” that being the Chinese navy.

Ultimately, Qin pleaded guilty in April 2021 to conspiring to violate U.S. export regulations on his purchases in 2015 and 2016 of dual-use equipment, such as the underwater listening devices that can be used to counter enemy submarines in potential conflict zones like the South China Sea, the U.S. government said in court documents. A judge sentenced him to two years in prison.

The 27-year-old Iraq-born Palestinian Aws Mohammed Younis Al-Jayab obtained refugee status and arrived in the U.S. in October 2012 with his family, who at the time had been living in Syria amid the civil war. The U.S. government granted his refugee status and entry into the United States.

But the vetting by USCIS that year somehow missed his decade-long stint as a “knowing and active” fighter, since the age of 16, for the U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization Ansar Al-Islam and other al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist groups in Iraq and Syria. The vetting also did not discover that he had continuously conducted executions and fought in large-scale battles with terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq right up to his departure to the United States as an ostensible refugee from those very groups.

According to court records from an FBI investigation and Department of Justice prosecution, Al-Jayab hailed from a tribe that was broadly enmeshed in terrorist group causes and operations inside Iraq. He was later recorded in potentially discoverable communications with his own father, a brother, other relatives, friends, and terrorist associates describing battles, favored weapons used, his personal involvement in the execution of victims by firearms, and participation in a high-profile bombing of the national security headquarters in Syria in the immediate years before receiving U.S. refugee status.

None of the court records from his prosecution or that of another Iraqi refugee who had resettled in Texas, Omar Al Hardan, also prosecuted for his support of Al Qaeda and ISIS, address how the USCIS vetting process missed Al-Jayab’s long, active involvement in regional terrorism groups, his wide associations with terrorist operatives, immediate relatives who were aware of his experience, and his social media postings.

But almost immediately upon his October 2012 arrival in the United States and while living in Wisconsin, Arizona, and California, Al-Jayab began plotting his return to fight with terrorist groups, communicating widely with operatives in the theater, posting his beliefs and intentions on social media, and telling his father, also granted refugee status and living in the United States, of his plans.

“Defendant’s intention was to return to Syria to fight, as indicated by what he told his father on November 17, 2012: ‘I will roam all over the world. I, the jihad is in my blood. ... I will attack the whole world including America and all that is in it. When I was in Syria, I told you, no one can stop me from my path,’” a government sentencing memorandum recounts,”The hell with money, and the hell with women, and the hell with America, and the hell with Obama. May God burn America! And the greatest tyrant, America, and I do not care about anything whatever it may be. The commandment of God is greater! ... I swear, I will bring out all of my anger on America.”

Thirteen months after receiving refugee status, in November 2013, he used temporary travel papers granted to refugees to fly back to the region on money sent to him by a network of his former terrorist comrades. For another year, he fought with the groups in the Aleppo region of Syria. He returned to the United States in January 2014. Not long after his return, Al-Jayab applied for an adjustment of status from refugee to lawful permanent resident, but security vetting for that turned out to be unnecessary.

By then, in about February 2014, an FBI counterterrorism investigation into his activities had begun. The bureau monitored and exploited the USCIS security vetting process that was part of the LPR application. Still, the FBI investigation took time during which Al-Jayab remained free inside the country.

Not until June 2015 -- nearly 18 months after his return from Syria and nearly four years after an initial USCIS refugee vetting failure allowed Al-Jayab into the country, did FBI agents finally interview him, a sentencing memorandum stated. He would not be arrested until January 2016, when a grand jury indicted him for lying on his 2014 LPR application about his travel to Syria and material support of foreign terrorist groups.

Because of initial failures to discover Al-Jayab’s terrorist group crimes during vetting for his 2012 refugee application, he remained free to attack inside the United States during all of these years and to illegally travel abroad to fight with terrorist groups despite a reasonable presumption that vetting agents could have learned that he was a combat-hardened and unrepentant terrorist who harbored a strong animus against the United States. In October 2019 a judge sentenced him to 60 months in prison.

22-year-old Sudanese Mohmoud Amin Mohamed Elhassan, who had been living in Egypt with his brothers and sisters since 2009, arrived in the U.S. with siblings on June 1, 2012, thanks to lawful permanent residence petitions their mother sought on their behalf. Several years earlier, she had entered the United States on temporary humanitarian parole for medical treatment and somehow obtained permanent residence herself, which qualified her to seek family reunification with her children in the United States. In Egypt, Elhassan had been studying Arabic at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University.

But evidence from an FBI terrorism investigation later revealed a strong likelihood that Elhassan was already radicalized when USCIS approved his LPR application in 2012, a likely discoverable circumstance that vetting adjudicators at the American embassy in Cairo, Egypt, missed.

Much later, FBI investigators discovered, for instance, that almost immediately after his U.S. arrival Elhassan was visiting jihadist websites using a pseudonym, establishing connections with overseas jihadists, and openly expressing antagonism toward the United States, court records show. Screeners should have been able to discover - via social media postings or interviews with those around him - that Elhassan was espousing support for violent jihad, often in graphic terms, and esired to participate directly in attacks inside the United States or abroad with terrorist groups.

He opened a Facebook page embossed with an image of a lone stalking wolf and described himself as such. One of those he messaged was a radical Sudanese cleric, Sheikh al-Jazouly, who was internationally notorious for promoting violent jihad. To him, Elhassan expressed his desire to be a “sleeper cell” inside the United States.

One posting directed to Sheikh al-Jazouly in June 2014 read, in part, “Praise be to Allah here with you is a sleeper cell. Sheikh pray for us for success and rewards,” according to a sentencing memorandum from the prosecution. In one May 2015 posting, Elhassan stated that “Allah commanded us to fight -- and fighting is not throwing candies but necks being chopped off and stomachs being slashes [sic] and eyes poked!”

Postings like these drew FBI attention to Elhassan, who attended Northern Virginia Community College and worked intermittently as a cab driver and at Starbucks.

By 2015, an FBI investigation revealed that Elhassan was involved in much more than posting violent jihadist propaganda. He recruited and persuaded a U.S. citizen, Joseph Hassan Farrokh, to quit his job, leave his new wife, and join ISIS in Syria.

Elhassan arranged the trip and planned to follow himself so that they could “chop heads” there together. On January 15, 2016, the FBI arrested Farrokh in Richmond, Va., as he was about to board a flight to the Middle East. Elhassan had driven him to the airport. Investigators believed that if Elhassan had been unable to join Farrokh in Syria, he envisioned himself acting as a “lone wolf” or “sleeper cell.”

In October 2016, Elhassan pleaded guilty to materially supporting the ISIS terror organization and lying to the FBI. A judge sentenced him to 11 years in prison.

George Rafidi was a Ramallah-born Palestinian Arab living and running businesses in Cameroon County, Texas, just across from Mexico, until he got caught up in a federal money-laundering investigation. Rafidi's lies and obfuscations about past terrorism activity against Israelis apparently went unnoticed on a 2012 application for U.S. citizenship and on pre-2008 applications for asylum and lawful permanent residence. Rafidi’s prevarications about membership in the U.S.-designated terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), including an Israeli arrest and prison term for violent activity, were discovered not during security vetting on his 2012 citizenship application, but through a federal money-laundering investigation years later, in 2018.

In 2019, Rafidi was convicted of covering up his PLFP activity and Israeli conviction on all of these applications dating to 2003, as well as for more recent citizenship-disqualifying criminal activities. For instance, ICE Homeland Security Investigations raided Rafidi's home and businesses, charging him and associates for allegedly operating illegal "eight-liner" slot machine casinos. Rafidi defeated national vetting systems three times on applications for asylum in 2000, lawful permanent residence in 2003, and U.S. citizenship in 2012, after the 9/11 attacks led to security vetting reforms. Due diligence checks at any point after 2003 and 2012 (or perhaps even prior to 2000) likely would have revealed Rafidi’s terrorist affiliations, particularly a check with the Israeli government intelligence services.

Federal court records alleged that Rafidi, after flying to the United States on a tourist visa in 2000 and overstaying it so that he could claim asylum, criminally failed to disclose that he served the PFLP from 1994-1996, and also that Israel in 1997 had convicted him of membership in an illegal group and for brokering a weapons purchase. Israel gave Rafidi an 18-month prison sentence, but freed him later in 1997 after only four months as part of a prisoner exchange.

The 2012 citizenship application was still pending when Rafidi came under investigation for operating illegal gambling machines and money-laundering in 2018, prompting an immigration officer to interview Rafidi in Cameron County, Texas. The FBI investigation led to immigration fraud charges and conviction but gained no assistance from immigration security vetting.

The Bangladesh-born Akayed Ullah, in the service of violent jihad in December 2017, set off a large home-built pipe bomb during morning rush hour beneath the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. The bomb misfired and injured only him and three bystanders but would have claimed a great many more had it exploded as intended.

The Brooklyn resident entered the United States in 2011 at age 20 with his mother and three siblings on an extended-family reunification visa applied for by a supposed U.S.-citizen uncle. Adjudicators approved the family's lawful permanent residence visas quickly. Granted, American adjudicators in 2011 may not have been able to pick up on evidence at that time suggesting Ullah hewed to extremist ideology; the post-attack FBI investigation found evidence of radicalization only dating to 2014, when Ullah began posting on social media and plotting to commit violence.

Still, USCIS agents may have uncovered Ullah’s predispositions when the security vetting window opened elsewhere: Ullah was never related to his supposed “uncle”, according to more recent media reports, meaning Ullah, his siblings, their mother, and the “uncle” would have been implicated in visa fraud had adjudicators interviewed family members and associates.

The family would never have been granted the visas in 2011 had this detectable fraud been detected and therefore Ullah would not have been present when he began radicalizing in 2014 or for the 2017 attack he ultimately committed.

Far too late, DHS reportedly moved to deport his mother and siblings for fraudulently obtaining visas for which they were ineligible. Had that been discovered at the time of application the bombing would never have happened. In 2018, Ullah was convicted of six federal charges related to the terrorism bombing and sentenced to life in prison.

A decade after the 9/11 terror attacks, in 2011, U.S. State Department consular officers in Saudi Arabia expeditiously granted local citizen Naif Abdulaziz Alfallaj an F-2 student spouse visa, permitting him to enter the United States. Alfallaj settled with his wife, an F-1 student visa holder, in the Oklahoma City suburb of Weatherford where she was attending the local university.

But State Department security screeners in Saudi Arabia somehow missed the discoverable red-alert fact that in 2000 Alfallaj joined al-Qaeda and trained in the group’s notorious al Faruq camp outside Kandahar, Afghanistan. It was the same terrorist camp — in the same time frame — where al-Qaeda leadership selected, organized, and trained the 9/11 hijackers for the attacks on America. They likely would have been campmates.

Those State Department screeners, who might still have felt a weight of responsibility since Osama bin Laden and 15 of his 9/11 hijackers were born and radicalized in the kingdom, would almost certainly have denied Alfallaj’s visa had they learned of his common past with them. After all, the history of terrorist visa abuse was well known by 2011, including that 9/11 hijackers entered the United States after they submitted 23 visa applications during the course of the plot, 22 of which a less-schooled generation of U.S. adjudicators approved.

But ostensibly more-schooled immigration vetters of the post-9/11 generation did not know — but easily could have with a certain check — that Alfallaj very likely trained among the hijackers as a contemporary.

Instead, this visa security screening lapse allowed an al Faruq camp veteran to fly into America just as did his deceased campmates 10 years earlier — legally, with a visa based on fraud and lies. Alfallaj remained free in the American heartland, his alarming history and intentions unknown for another five years. Who he really was only came to light in October 2016, in a darkly ironic way.

It did when he applied to a pilot school near Oklahoma City, just minutes from the flight school in Norman where, infamously, two of the 9/11 terrorists from Afghanistan camps received pilot training for the airliners they hijacked.

In late 2016, the school provided his fingerprints to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA, formed as a result of the attacks), which ran them and got the hit, prosecution court records later showed. Alfallaj’s prints matched 15 found on a 2000 “Mujahedeen Data Form” application, which al Qaeda bureaucracy in those days required aspiring terrorist camp trainees to submit. The prints had been awaiting a match in U.S. databases since December 1, 2001, when American soldiers recovered them in a raid on an al-Qaeda safe house in Afghanistan.

During the lengthy counterterrorism investigation that followed, FBI agents found that Allfallaj had remained true to violent jihad while in the United States even if the public record reveals no sign that he was going to attack the homeland. Two years after moving to Oklahoma in 2013, he joined an online extremist forum and, using his old al-Faruq camp nickname, expressed desire to join armed jihad in Afghanistan or Chechnya. He didn’t get the chance to kill there or here.

On February 5, 2018, the FBI arrested the 34-year-old Alfallaj on charges that he lied on the visa application and to the FBI about his terrorist past. In 2019, a federal judge sentenced Alfallaj to 12 years in prison, after which he will be deported to Saudi Arabia.

Liberia national Mohammed Jabbateh, a ruthless Liberian warlord also known as “Jungle Jabbah”, managed to enter the United States and live in hiding for years in East Lansdowne, Pa. He married, started a family, and launched a shipping business, winning asylum from the U.S. government and, eventually, permanent residence, according to the Washington Post, but managed to evade federal investigation until 2013 and was sentenced to 30 years in prison in 2018. During the height of Liberia’s first civil war from 1992 to 1995, Jabbateh, while serving as commander of a warring faction known as the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy (ULIMO), committed various acts of “shocking brutality including rapes, sexual enslavement, slave labor, murder, mutilation and ritual cannibalism. He also used children as soldiers,” according to a Department of Justice press release, and was known to order the hearts cut from live victims whose relatives were forced to cook and eat them.

“This defendant committed acts of such violence and depravity that they are almost beyond belief,” said U.S. Attorney William M. McSwain. “This man is responsible for atrocities that will ripple for generations in Liberia.

Court records show key vetting failures occurred in the late 1990s, before the post-9/11 security screening reforms, when Jabbateh withheld information about who he really was in a 1998 asylum application that allowed him to enter the United States. He was granted asylum after screening in 1999, again lying on the forms about his wartime activities. However, from 2002 through 2011, after reforms, U.S. immigration authorities failed to learn who Jabbateh really was despite years of potential opportunities.

In 2002, Jabbateh sought to adjust his status from asylee to lawful permanent residence, and filed an application in which he again covered up his wartime militia involvement. For reasons unknown, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reviewers did not interview Jabatteh as part of his LPR application screening for almost a decade, in 2011, leaving him to prosper in business and enjoy raising five U.S.-born children. That is the post-9/11-reforms failure.

According to the war-crimes news website Global Geneva, “it was an open secret in the intelligence community that Liberian war criminals were living under their real identities in west Philadelphia.”

It’s unclear whether Jabatteh ever got his LPR status, but it doesn’t matter because federal authorities did not mount an investigation of him until 2013, the Washington Post reported. He was not arrested or charged until three more years after that, in 2016. The timeline shows he enjoyed freedom inside the United States from the time he applied for LPR in 2002, through his immigration screening interview in 2011 and until his arrest in 2016.

This time lapse likely had no connection to suspicions or tips that Jabatteh was a war criminal because, again, federal investigators did not mount an investigation until 2013, according to the Washington Post.

On April 19, 2018, a federal judge sentenced Jabatteh to 30 years in prison on several counts of immigration fraud, the longest sentence ever imposed for that crime.

Bangladesh citizen Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis came to the U.S. in January 2012 on an F-1 student visa to study cybersecurity at Southeast Missouri State University. His middle-class parents had sent him to a private school in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, but when he underperformed they decided to send him to a U.S. school as a means to put him on a better career trajectory. State Department officials at the U.S. embassy in Dhaka would have vetted him during their review of the F-1 visa during 2011.

But FBI counterterrorism investigators were the ones who discovered in the summer of 2012 that Nafis was already fully radicalized in violent jihad when he entered the United States on his F-1 visa and intending to conduct a terrorist attack, according to prosecutors and media reports. When he entered, for example, he brought with him bomb-making instructions and speeches by Anwar al-Awlaki, a now-deceased propagandist for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

He also immediately set about trying to recruit multiple individuals to form a terrorist cell for al-Qaeda, federal authorities later discovered and alleged. One fellow student noted that Nafis had spoken admiringly of Osama bin Laden.

“Nafis came to the United States radicalized and bent on fighting jihad here in our homeland,” U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch said in an August 2013 statement.

In a 2013 letter to the federal judge overseeing his case, Nafis wrote that “At my university in Bangladesh I did not have any real friends. So, when the radical students, who were influential and famous, were nice to me I fell for them easily.”

In fact, court records and New York Times reporting explained that “famous and respected” jihadists at his private college in Dhaka successfully had recruited him to violent jihad prior to his U.S. entry on the visa, and this was well known among Nafiz's family and associates. Any security vetting for the F-1 student visa might reasonably have discovered that he was dangerous had it included interviews of those in Nafis’ family, social, and school circles, in Bangladesh, where State Department personnel conducted the security vetting.

Nafis’ true intentions came to light in July 2012 because one of those he tried to recruit into his terrorism cell was an FBI informant, which led to an elaborate sting operation.

Nafis withdrew from his Missouri school after one semester and moved to New York City to conduct his terror attack, enrolling in a Brooklyn college for cover and working as a busboy at a Manhattan restaurant. With undercover FBI informants now in on his plans, Nafis considered killing a high-ranking U.S. official before settling on using a purported 1,000-pound bomb to destroy the New York Federal Reserve Bank. In a statement claiming responsibility for what he believed would happen to the bank, Nafis wrote that he wanted to “destroy America” by striking a blow at its economy. But Nafis also expected to kill women and children, citing quotations from “our beloved Sheikh Osama bin Laden” justifying such killing.

State Department officials later defended their security vetting by saying the process mainly includes checking various U.S. government databases and fingerprint records “on a case-by-case basis”, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland told reporters at the time.

But in the Nafis case, any evidence of his radicalization likely would have required more thorough methods beyond running database checks in case derogatory reporting on an individual was not yet known.

“The suspect did have a student visa to attend a legitimate academic program in the United States, for which he was qualified,” Nuland was quoted saying.

In 2013, Nafis was convicted of terrorism offenses and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

In 2009, 24-year-old Iraqi-born Palestinian Omar Faraj Saeed Al Hardan settled in Texas on a refugee visa after living for nine months in camps on the Iraq-Jordanian border. Less than two years later, in August 2011, USCIS granted him lawful permanent residence (LPR) during a process that would have required standard security vetting for terrorism ideology and activity. He was later caught up in a 2016 plot to bomb to Houston shopping malls.

FBI agents later learned that he was deeply radicalized by "at least" April 2013 and was expressing desire for martyrdom to another Iraqi refugee in Sacramento, Calif., named Aws Mohammed Younis Al-Jayab and earlier to relatives. Al Hardan's fellow refugee and friend in California, Al-Jayab, was a hardened al-Nusra Front and ISIS jihadist whose own jihadist battleground experience USCIS security vetters entirely missed. Al-Jayab was planning a return to the battlefield and actually did. Al Hardan wanted to follow and die in a "martyrdom" operation overseas or in a terror attack inside the United States, the FBI later discovered.

No public evidence could be found confirming that Al Hardan had radicalized before he received his refugee visa in 2009 and so vetting failure was unlikely then. 

But the Al Hardan case is included here on the analytical judgement that he likely was already an extremist by the time USCIS adjudicators granted him legal residence in 2011, given the intensity of his commitment to suicidal violence that investigators said was traceable to “at least” early 2013 and earlier to relatives.

Furthermore, Al Hardan's 2011 quest for immigration status was incorporated into his later jihadist planning because legal residence is a precondition to applying for U.S. citizenship, which he thought was needed to travel abroad to fight with terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq. Indeed, he did apply for citizenship in August 2014.

But that screening also did not turn up his radicalization or plotting. (In 2014, the FBI opened an investigation into Al Hardan as a potential terrorism threat during the investigation into the communications of Al Jayab and would not arrest him until 2016.)

His radicalization was discoverable in and around that early 2013 period, when Al Hardan repeatedly told family members he planned to die a martyr, and he was posting support for terrorist groups and attacks on social media for an unspecified period before his 2016 arrest. He also was collecting bomb-making components for potential plans to attack a military base in Grand Prairie, Texas, and to blow up two Houston shopping malls, federal investigators alleged in court records.

By the time Al Hardan applied for U.S. citizenship in August 2014, the citizenship vetting process would have been moot because the FBI already had an active investigation targeting him that involved undercover informants.

The government charged Al Hardan with attempting to provide material support and resources, including personnel, specifically himself; training; and expert advice and assistance to ISIS. In December 2016, a federal judge sentenced him to 16 years in prison.

Turkey-born Oytun Ayse Mihalik had been studying and working in the United States since at least 2002, probably on an F-1 student visa initially to gain educational credentials from a Long Island university to practice as a pharmacist, and then likely on an H-1B skilled worker visa she obtained in July 2006. She married a U.S. citizen in 2007, qualifying her to eventually apply for a lawful permanent residence green card, which would not have been necessary for her as yet since she already had a sponsored work visa good for several years.

The couple settled in Orange County, Calif., Mihalik using her pharmacist credentials to work for a national chain of drug stores.

By the time Oytun Mihalik decided to apply for the green card, sometime in 2010, she was leaving her husband and was soundly radicalized as a supporter of violent jihad, apparently also following in the footsteps of an older U.S.-based brother who suddenly departed to Pakistan, court records show. At one point as she and her husband were breaking up, Mihalik wired money to an al-Qaeda terrorist in Pakistan with whom she began intensely communicating on social media channels about her brother. She sent the money understanding that it was for that terrorist to build a car bomb for attacks on U.S. troops, a later FBI and ICE-Homeland Security Investigations counterterrorism investigation found.

There would have been plenty of red flags for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services LPR application security screeners to find had they looked hard enough, perhaps interviewing family members and friends, in the months prior to issuing her the LPR green card, who could have reported her radicalization. USCIS granted her LPR in January 2011 despite obtainable evidence that she had been fully radicalized for several years.

For example, much later, her husband would report that by 2009, Mihalik had returned from a lengthy stay in Turkey with a newfound religious fervor and interest in securing her green card under false pretenses. By 2010, she was planning to follow her radicalized U.S.-based brother in joining the same terrorist group in Pakistan on “religious pilgrimage”.

USCIS missed another chance to learn, only a month or two before issuing the green card, in December 2010, of her radicalization and plans. Mihalik’s just-separated husband had gone to ICE Homeland Security Investigations agents with a tip about her radicalization, that she posed a terrorist threat to the homeland, and with an allegation of marriage fraud.

Her husband reported to the HSI agents that he believed Mihalik had married him under “false pretences” for the green card, according to the Los Angeles Times. He described a new religious fervor in his wife after the Turkey trip (in 2009, giving USCIS security screeners plentiful time to detect radicalization, perhaps through careful family interviews, before they issued the LPR status).

“I go, ‘Listen, did you marry … me for my citizenship and do you want to harm someone here.’ And she looked at me blank and she said, ‘If I have to kill people for Allah, I will,’” the husband reported, according to a transcript filed with court papers.

Instead, Mihalik was free to plot and support at least terrorist activity overseas aimed at the murder of western military personnel and civilians.

In her U.S.-based collaboration with the Pakistani terrorists, Mihalik used an alias and sent the last of three different wire transfers to Pakistan the same month she received her green card, in January 2011. Federal prosecutors later said she was fully engaged in supporting violent jihad and knew the money she sent would be used for a car bomb.

Just as the federal counterterrorism investigation triggered by her husband was taking off, Mihalik managed to get to Turkey in February 2011. Upon her August 2011 return, the FBI and HSI officers interviewed her at the airport about the wire transfers and her relationship with the terrorist operative. After another interview with agents later that August, Mihalik tried to leave the country using a one-way ticket to Turkey but was arrested on terrorism charges before she could board.

In 2012, Mihalik pleaded guilty to making false statements in a terrorism investigation, admitting she knew her donation would be used to prepare for and carry out attacks against U.S. military personnel and others overseas. In 2013, a federal judge sentenced her to five years in prison with orders that her green card be revoked and that she be deported to Turkey.