Hezbollah terrorist arrested at US border wanted to make a bomb

A Lebanese man caught trying to illegally cross the border near El Paso, Texas, reportedly claimed he was a member of the terror group Hezbollah, hoped to make a bomb and wanted to go to New York.  

U.S. Border Patrol apprehended 22-year-old Basel Bassel Ebbadi on March 9. He stated in a sworn affidavit after his arrest that he trained with Hezbollah for seven years and served four more as a guard for weapons locations. 

Hezbollah is an Iran-backed terrorist group that has attacked Israeli communities and military outposts following Hamas’ Oct. 7 onslaught against the Jewish state. Israel was eventually forced to evacuate thousands of residents from its northern border towns due to the repeated fire exchanges between Hezbollah and Israel.

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According to documents shared Sunday by The New York Post, which first reported on the story, Ebbadi admitted in a March 11 interview following his apprehension that he was in the United States because he wanted to “try to make a bomb.” He was then placed in isolation and referred to the Tactical Terrorism Response Team. 

At one point during an interview with officials, the migrant claimed he fled Lebanon to escape Hezbollah, saying that he “didn’t want to kill people” and “once you’re in, you can never get out.” According to Ebbadi, his training with Hezbollah focused on “Jihad,” which, in Islam, typically means to wage war against non-Muslims until they submit to Islam. 

Ebbadi also claimed that a robbery in Costa Rica is why he did not have any identifying documents when he entered the U.S., according to the report. The migrant said he used a fake name and birthday in Sweden, Ecuador and Panama, and he lied about his father residing in Ecuador.

While internal documents show that Ebbadi is marked for deportation, according to The New York Post, the country to which he will be returned is unclear. 

The news of Ebbadi’s apprehension comes amid a reported increase in the number of known or suspected terrorists using fake identification after crossing the southern border. FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the U.S. House Select Intelligence Committee last week that the FBI has seen this number increase within the last five years. 

“There are a few different categories of people that we have concerns about,” Wray said. “When a known or suspected terrorist, as in known that they’re a known or suspected terrorist, is apprehended at the border, I’m confident in the vast majority of instances there’s very close lash-up between FBI and DHS (Department of Homeland Security) on it.

“The bigger concern is a situation, for example, where somebody presents fake identification documents at the border and there’s not biometrics to match up — so there’s no way to be able to know that they’re not who they say they are. Then, they get into the country; then somehow we find out that they’re someone, in fact, who’s on the list.”

According to data last year from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 151 individuals on the Terrorist Screening Dataset were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border. Officials encountered 98 known or suspected terrorists at the Southwest border during the previous fiscal year. 

For the year 2021, which includes the last three-and-a-half months of the Trump administration and the first seven-and-a-half months of the Biden administration, 15 known or suspected terrorists were caught at the Southwest border.

A former intelligence official told NewsNation last week that migrants will sneak into the country by moving to places like Brazil before coming to the U.S. and claiming that as their country of origin.

“They’re infiltrating us within these groups that are turning themselves in because a lot of them have been in Mexico for a while. They learned to speak Spanish. They shaved their beards. They look like possibly a Mexican national, a Central American, and they have fake documents,” former Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent Victor Avila said. 

“So, they present these fake documents and enter with a different nationality. It just gives me chills to think of the national security implications that we’re facing and that we possibly will face in the near future,” he continued.