The committee’s chairman, Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), asked former Ambassador Nathan Sales, “What guarantees do we have” that Hamas and other Iranian-backed terrorists aren’t among the more than 1.7 million illegal immigrant “gotaways” that have crossed the southern U.S. border since 2021.
“I don’t think we have any guarantees, Mr. Chairman. I think we have to assume the worst,” Mr. Sales replied. “We know that Iranian-linked terrorists have been found in the United States.
He pointed out that, prior to the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack from Gaza on Israel, “128 Hezbollah operatives have been arrested here over the years by the FBI.” Hezbollah, like Hamas, is funded, equipped, and directed by Iran’s radical Islamic regime.
“Within that population of however many millions or hundreds of thousands of known gotaways, we should not assume that they are all perfectly clean,” Mr. Sales said.
Mr. Sales was ambassador-at-large and coordinator for counterterrorism, as well as acting undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy, and human rights under President Donald Trump. He also served in the Trump administration as special presidential envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS.
“Last year, the Justice Department announced charges against an [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] IRGC member believed to be the ringleader of a plot to murder John Bolton, the former national security adviser,” he said. “The would-be assassin reportedly also was targeting former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. These former officials and others like them now live under constant, 24-hour government protection because of the Iranian threat to their lives.”
Other witnesses warned the committee in similar terms.
From 2008 to 2019, Mr. Warrick was deputy assistant secretary for counter-terrorism policy at the DHS.
“The U.S. Border Patrol has encountered 72,823 ’special interest aliens’ on America’s borders over the past two years, many from the Middle East,” Mr. Greenway said. “Multiple CBP reports of apprehensions between ports of entry between October 2021 and October 2023 show that agents encountered 6,386 nationals from Afghanistan in that period, 3,153 from Egypt, 659 from Iran, 538 from Syria, 139 from Yemen, 123 from Iraq, 164 from Lebanon, 1,613 from Pakistan, 15,594 from Mauritania, 13,624 from Uzbekistan, and 30,830 from Turkey.”
Asked by Mr. Green if he agreed with Mr. Sales’s warning about the national security threat posed to the United States by the open border with Mexico, Mr. Greenway said: “There is no question, Mr. Chairman, and again, they’ve got a stated and past record of doing exactly that. I would also note that their surrogates and Iran itself are engaged in criminal activity, so it would not be a surprise that they would make common cause with other criminal networks.”
Mr. Greenway was referring to Iranian-backed terrorist groups partnering with Mexican drug cartels and Eastern European criminal syndicates.
The criminal syndicates factor was of particular concern to the hearing’s fourth witness, Masih Alinejad, an Iranian journalist and political activist who was forced to flee her country of birth. Now a U.S. citizen, she lives in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City.
“The constant need to move without knowing the exact nature of the dangers brought great hardships on myself, my husband, and my stepchildren. We all had to pretend to live a normal life while constantly on the move.
“This reality again struck home last July, when a man armed with an AK-47 came to my house in Brooklyn to kill me on direct orders from the Islamic Republic. The assassin, a member of an East European criminal gang, had been stalking me for days, waiting outside my home and monitoring my activities and those of my family, neighbors, and friends.”
