As many as 18,000 terrorists entered the US during the Biden administration, National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent revealed during a House committee hearing on Thursday.
“So far, NCTC has identified around 18,000 known and suspected terrorists that the Biden administration let come into our country,” Kent testified before the House Homeland Security Committee.
“These are individuals who under normal circumstances would never be allowed to enter our country because of their ties to jihadi groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda,” he said.
“Yet the Biden administration not only let them into the country and in many cases facilitated their entry into the country just like the entry of the Afghan terrorists who committed the terrorist attack here just before Thanksgiving, killing one of our National Guard members and wounding another.”
Kent pointed out in the House hearing that the accused National Guard shooter, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was “just one of 88,000” Afghans — and his counterterrorism office has since “identified 2,000 of that group of 88,000 who have ties to terrorist organizations.”
Stunningly, Kent claimed that the remaining 16,000 with terror ties doesn’t even include migrants “who came here illegally through the open border.”
The Trump administration recently warned Americans that the US was at “heightened risk of terrorist attacks,” Kent said, noting risks from “terrorists, pretty much of all stripes, but in particular from ISIS and from al-Qaeda.”
The thousands of known and suspected terrorists are also implementing a “new playbook” that is “decentralized,” according to the NCTC director, like “the attacks of Oct. 7.”
“They’re not looking necessarily for a spectacular attack like we had on 9/11, but targets of opportunity like we tragically saw with the terrorist attack in Washington, DC, these smaller cells or even individual operatives taking action,” he explained.
“That’s what has us very concerned, combined with just the sheer volume.”
The Trump administration and congressional Republicans have blamed former President Joe Biden’s lax vetting of Afghan refugees for the terror attack that killed National Guardswoman Sarah Beckstrom and wounded Guardsman Andrew Wolfe in DC on the day before Thanksgiving.
Democrats like Ranking Member Bennie Thompson (Miss.) disagreed with Noem and Kent that the Biden administration’s lax vetting enabled the DC National Guard shooting before Thanksgiving, pointing to the Trump administration having granted Lakanwal asylum in April.
“These individuals, despite what has been reported, were not vetted properly to come into the United States,” Kent said. “The individual terrorist who committed the attack in DC, he was vetted to serve as a soldier in Afghanistan.”
“The Biden administration essentially used his tactical level vetting as a ruse to bring him here and to bring him into our communities,” he added. “We’ve seen the tragic results of that.”
Thompson also got swift blowback in the hearing for also referring to the killing of Beckstrom, 20, as an “unfortunate accident.”
“You think that was an unfortunate accident?” Noem fired back. “It was a terrorist attack. He shot our National Guardsman in the head.”
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