WASHINGTON — Eight people from Tajikistan with suspected ties to Islamic State have been arrested in the United States in recent days, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
The arrests were made in New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles and the individuals, who entered the U.S. through the southern border, are being held on immigration violations, said the people, who were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation by name and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
The nature of their suspected ties to the Islamic State was not immediately clear, but the individuals were being tracked by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). They had been taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who made the arrests while cooperating with the JTTF, pending proceedings to remove them from the country.
The individuals from Tajikistan entered the country last spring and passed the U.S. government’s screening process without providing information that would have identified them as potential terrorism-related concerns, one of the people familiar with the matter said.
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security released a statement confirming the immigration-related arrests of “several non-citizens” but did not provide details. The agencies noted that the US was in a “heightened threat environment.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray has said the US faces increasing threats from both domestic violent extremists and foreign terrorist organizations, especially in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.
He said at a recent congressional hearing that officials were “concerned about the terrorism implications of potential attacks on border vulnerabilities.” The Biden administration in August said it had identified and stopped a network attempting to smuggle people from Uzbekistan to the US and that at least one member of the network had ties to a foreign terrorist group.
“The FBI and DHS will continue to work with our partners around the clock to identify, investigate and disrupt potential threats to national security,” the agencies said.