Quantico is home to the FBI academy, FBI laboratory, military officer schools, and intelligence commands. Claiming to be Amazon contractors making a delivery to the base's post office, the men were stopped at the gate when they failed to provide the necessary credentials. Military police, noticing the vehicle was not affiliated with the base, directed the truck to a holding area for further vetting. However, the driver ignored the officers’ instructions and continued to drive past the holding area, attempting to access the base, prompting officers to use vehicle denial barriers to stop them. The two men were detained. According to Potomac Local News, which broke the story, one of the individuals was a Jordanian national who had recently entered the U.S. through the southern border, and another was on the U.S. terrorist watch list, though Quantico officials did not confirm these details. Both men were eventually turned over to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Since then, the Biden administration has declined to confirm that the incident was a terrorist attack. However, a top border security and immigration expert says the attempt to breach the base was indeed a terrorist attack, and the incident is being downplayed to help the re-election changes of President Joe Biden. “In my reasoned opinion, a Jordanian immigrant who illegally crossed the Southwest Border from Mexico finally staged the first known terrorism attack on U.S. soil on May 3 after having accessed the target from the Mexican border,” Todd Bensman, Senior National Security Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, wrote in an op-ed. “The government didn’t offer a word about this incident” until news of the story broke, he explained. ICE released a statement on May 16 confirming the two Jordanian nationals were in ICE custody, but refused to confirm the contents of the box truck or whether the men were on the terrorism watchlist. “But the administration’s coordinated refusal to address the terrorism aspects led me — and should lead everyone else — to the conclusion that it most definitely was a terror attack by a border-crossing ‘special interest alien,’” wrote Bensman. He continued:In the early morning hours of May 3, two men attempted to force their way onto the Quantico Marine Corps Base using a box truck.
I base my reasoned conclusion that a border-crossing terrorist did finally strike — a fear that has gone unconsummated and often ridiculed since 9/11 — in part on repeated refusals by the White House, the Department of Defense, the FBI, and ICE to address terrorism as the motive. Consider that since the 9/11 attacks federal authorities and the American people have enjoyed a kind of public compact that now stands broken. It is that the government almost always clarifies to the American public whether its top counterterrorism professionals regard initially ambiguous attacks as motivated by international or domestic terrorism — or not — and often a thumbs up or down as to whether the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force was investigating. But the Biden administration will not engage in this one rare case, a startling break with post-9/11 tradition. I believe the reason Biden’s people won’t acknowledge the first-ever border-crossing terror attack attempts to serve political aims, at the expense of public safety. They know that acknowledging a terror attack from the border crisis would further damage a Biden re-election campaign that is already suffering dearly from it. Though the men had no weapons, a former staffer who worked at the Quantico base in Virginia says the attempt to forcibly enter the base was a “dry run” to probe the base’s security. "Driving the box truck was a dry run for driving a box truck that was not going to be empty the second time," said Dave Katz, a former DEA agent and the CEO and founder of Global Security Group. "Can I prove that? No. But it's like the 9/11 hijackers trying to get aboard planes with box cutters on other occasions prior to actually perpetrating the act." More than a dozen congressional lawmakers are also seeking answers from the federal government about the incident. “A brazen attempt to infiltrate a military installation by foreign nationals from a terror-prone region rightly raises concerns as to whether this constituted a possible terrorist attack,” the group of congressmen said in a letter to U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. “Yet, the federal government has not disclosed whether this breach was terror-related.” Congress is seeking answers to numerous questions surrounding the incident and are demanding “prompt” answers. So far, there are no reports the Biden administration has categorized or is investigating the incident as a terrorist incident. However, “any official acknowledgement that it was done for the global jihad delivers a giant new sledgehammer at the doorstep of Trump’s campaign headquarters” during an election contest where polling is tight between the top two presidential candidates, wrote Bensman. “It’s that the Biden administration will not rule it out even though doing so would quickly end the political threat to Biden’s reelection. A rule-out would quickly send packing people like me and assure the story can never grow into a Trump sledgehammer. With a simple rule-out, we all just disappear, and columns like this never get written,” he added. “I believe the Biden administration won’t rule out terrorism because they know the May 3 attempted truck ramming was a terrorism attack, and officials are not willing to risk impugning themselves by publicly saying otherwise,” Bensman said.
