New York City has been placed on alert for possible terrorist attacks following the arrest of eight individuals with suspected ties to ISIS who crossed the southern border this week, according to reports.
Eight people from Tajikistan with suspected ties to the Islamic State group were arrested in the US in recent days, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
The arrests took place in New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles and the individuals, who entered the US through the US-Mexico border, are being held on immigration violations.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Security Chief Greg Ehrie warned that New York City could be the target of an “extremely serious” terrorism threat.
Ehrie said during an interview with CNN: “It’s extremely serious. I liken it to a weather front. You’re seeing all the fronts coming into play.”
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Ehrie added: “We have a border issue. We have an ideological issue. We have ISIS-K—which is increasing their external operations—and then we find these individuals who we don’t really know a lot about in our borders.
“In the business of terrorism, you want the notoriety, you want the media attention. You start to think: What’s the next target that would get them the most notoriety, that would make the biggest splash for them? It’s hard not to come back to the United States.”
The nature of the eight individuals’ suspected connections to ISIS was not immediately clear, but the individuals were being tracked by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, or JTTF. They were in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which made the arrests while working with the JTTF, pending proceedings to remove them from the country.
The individuals from Tajikistan entered the country last spring and passed through the US government’s screening process without turning up information that would have identified them as potential terrorism-related concerns, said one of the people familiar with the matter.
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued a statement confirming the immigration-related arrests of “several non-citizens” but did not detail specifics. The agencies noted that the US has been in a “heightened threat environment.”
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While no specific threat to New York City has been reported, the city is often considered a likely target for future attacks following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and its twin towers.
FBI Director Christopher Wray has said the US is facing accelerating threats from homegrown violent extremists as well as foreign terrorist organizations, particularly in the aftermath of the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel.
He said at one recent congressional hearing that officials were “concerned about the terrorism implications from potential targeting of vulnerabilities at the border.” The Biden administration in August said that it had detected and stopped a network attempting to smuggle people from Uzbekistan into the US and that at least one member of the network had links to a foreign terrorist group.
The agencies said: “The FBI and DHS will continue working around the clock with our partners to identify, investigate, and disrupt potential threats to national security.”
