by Nicole Robinson
On a tranquil Friday morning 3rd of Maytwo men posing as Amazon subcontractors drove a truck to the main entrance gate to the Quantico naval base in Virginia.
The men did not provide approved access credentials and were not associated with the database. They claimed they were delivering the parcel to the post office.
As is standard protocol, gate officers directed the truck to a holding area for additional inspection, but the driver ignored the command and attempted to force the gate open. Fortunately, vehicle entry barriers prevented the truck from entering the base.
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Both drivers were detained and ultimately turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They were later identified as Jordanian citizens. One of the men was in the United States illegally on an expired student visa, the other had only recently crossed the US border in San Diego.
Nearly a month later, there are still many unanswered questions in this case. For example, the men’s identities are still not revealed. The Department of Homeland Security won’t reveal who the men are, citing privacy concerns for asylum seekers.
Doesn’t the public have a right to know who these uninvited guests are, given the obvious threat they pose to national security?
Most importantly, why did it take nearly two weeks for base officials to notify staff of the security breach?
Interestingly, the public learned about the incident on May 10 only thanks to a local reporter he broke history.
The reporter worked in the so-called tip from Matt Strickland, a Virginia politician who ran for state Senate in 2023. Strickland received the nomination message from a Quantico employee regarding attempted infringement. The message indicated that the man who crossed the border was on a watch list of people at risk of terrorism, which the authorities did not confirm.
Republican members of Congress AND Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin sent letters to President Joe Biden and Interior Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas asking for a full account of the incident, but no modern details were released.
This is not the first case of foreigners trying to break into sensitive military facilities.
In a May 24 interview with Fox News, Navy Adm. Daryl Caudle he stated that such events “are happening more and more often and we see them two or three times a week.”
Many of those trying to get to military bases come from Russia and China.
In other cases, foreigners have attacked high-ranking U.S. military officials.
On the same day as the Quantico incident, two Chechens were killed caught taking photos in front of the family home of a US Army colonel near Fort Liberty, North Carolina. The immigration status of both men remains unconfirmed.
This is not an isolated case. Many U.S. Special Operations Soldiers across the country do reported suspicious surveillance of them and their families.
While some of these incidents may be related to espionage, many experts fear they are desiccated runs in preparation for targeted attacks on military personnel or larger terrorist attacks on government facilities or military bases.
FBI Director Christopher Wray even did this warned potential attack.
“I have never seen a time where all or so many of the threats were elevated, all at the exact same time… Everywhere I turn, I see flashing lights,” Wray said in December.
These incidents are directly related to the Biden administration’s open borders policy.
From 2017 to 2020, border officers recorded A total of 14 encounters with individuals on the terrorist watchlist took place between ports of entry along the northern and southern borders of the United States.
After three years of the Biden administration, that number increased to a total of 286 meetings. This means an enhance of 2500%. known meetings over the course of three years.
These numbers do not reflect the number of people who were either never caught or were not on a terrorist watchlist.
Weak verification procedures combined with the overwhelming flow of illegal migrants across the border enhance the risk of bad actors getting through.
On March 9, near El Paso, Texas, the US Border Patrol caught a Lebanese citizen named Basel Bassel Ebbadi, who taken over be part of Hezbollah.
In an interview with authorities, Ebbadi said he had trained with Hezbollah for seven years and was going to New York to make a bomb. He was not on the terrorism threat list and therefore could have been there released if he remained hushed about his ties to terrorism.
What is the Biden administration doing about this? In the first week of June, Biden signed executive order that temporarily suspends the entry of illegal immigrants “in the event of overcrowding at the southern border.”
Apart from its subjective nature and loopholes in the executive order, it has no impact address over 1.5 million escapes or over 5.4 million illegal crossings recorded by U.S. Customs and Border Protection since Biden took office in 2021.
Incidents like the one at Quantico and near Fort Liberty are just the beginning.
Indeed, the red lights are flashing and it may already be too tardy to stop the attack on the homeland.
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Nicole Robinson is a senior research fellow at the Allison Center for Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation.
