Basel Bassel Ebbadi was caught by the U.S. Border Patrol on March 9 near El Paso, according to the New York Post, which first broke the story. After being asked what he was doing in the U.S., he replied, “I’m going to try to make a bomb,” the Post reported. Ebbadi, a 22-year-old man from Lebanon who told authorities he wanted to travel to New York, was placed in isolation and referred to the Tactical Terrorism Response Team (TTRT) for further questioning after making “terroristic threats to personnel.” During an interview after his arrest, he said he had trained with Hezbollah for seven years and served as an active member guarding weapons locations for an additional four years, the Post reported. His training focused on “jihad” and killing people who were not Muslim, Ebbadi told authorities. Internal government documents reviewed by the Post show that Ebbadi did not have documents and claimed he was robbed by someone with a knife in Costa Rica. He also admitted to using a fake birthday and name in Sweden, Ecuador and Panama earlier this year. During the 2023 fiscal year, border agents encountered 172 individuals on the terrorist watchlist. So far, during the first four months of 2024, 59 people on the watchlist have already been apprehended, as the Post reported. Ebbadi’s arrest comes on the heels of numerous warnings from federal officials and experts who have been sounding the alarm over the threat of terrorists entering the U.S. by sneaking across the southern border with Mexico. During a recent interview, Todd Bensman, Sr. National Security Fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), said that Hezbollah’s sleeper cell, Unit 910, has already infiltrated the U.S. Last fall, the San Diego Field office of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) warned that members of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad could be crossing the border into the U.S. In the Department of Homeland Security’s 2024 Homeland Threat Assessment, officials warn that “terrorists and criminal actors may exploit the elevated flow [across the border] and increasingly complex security environment to enter the United States."Federal authorities have detained an illegal alien who crossed into the U.S. through the southern border and admitted to Border Patrol officials that he is a member of Hezbollah, an internationally recognized, Iranian-backed terrorist group.
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