Hezbollah Terrorist Arrested at US Border Highlights Concern Over America as 'Open Target'
U.S. Border Patrol arrested a Hezbollah terrorist on the southern border earlier this month.
Border Patrol agents caught the 22-year-old Lebanese man entering the U.S. illegally on March 9th near the border town of El Paso, Texas, according to a Border Patrol document exclusively obtained by The New York Post.
Basel Bassel Ebaddi told officials he trained with Hezbollah for seven years to carry out jihad and that he also served as an active member guarding weapons locations for another four years.
When asked why he came to the U.S. he replied, "I'm going to try to make a bomb" and named his destination as New York.
In a later interview, Ebaddi said he's been trying to escape Lebanon and Hezbollah because "he didn't want to kill people" and added "once you're in, you can never get out," according to internal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) documents.
As CBN News reported, Hezbollah, an Iran-backed terrorist group, played a role in the gruesome Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the group continues to attack the country daily with deadly artillery and rocket strikes.
Former IDF Spokesman Jonathan Conricus told CBN News Hezbollah is much stronger than Hamas.
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"We're talking about 130,000 rockets," he explained. "We're talking about bigger payloads and we're talking about much bigger range, including high-quality weapons that can strike specific locations in Israel, which Hamas does not possess, and many other weapons that Hezbollah has been provided by the Iranians."
Meanwhile, the recent incident highlights concerns over the crisis on the porous southern U.S. border and how it leaves America as an open target for terrorism.
"I'm very worried about 10, 20, 50, a hundred more Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists coming over and intending to do something worse than 9/11, intending to do something on the order of magnitude of Oct. 7, or even worse," said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). "This is a clear and present danger. And it is caused daily by Joe Biden and congressional Democrats, leaving our border wide open."
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reports the number of encounters with individuals on the terror watchlist jumped from 98 in 2022 to 172 in 2023.
From October to January, Border Patrol arrested 58 illegal immigrants who were on the FBI terrorist watchlist.
Simone Ledeen, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Mid-East Policy, told CBN News that Hezbollah is a "very real threat" to the United States.
"They have sleeper cells here in the U.S. in many cities across the country. This has been documented in multiple court cases, and we have reason to believe that they also have caches where they have stored materials around the country, in the event that someone hits the go button to start attacks. I believe they are pretty well prepared. They have been sitting in wait for the order to go, many believe, for years now," Ledeen said.
Republicans have blasted the Biden administration for its lack of response to the crisis at the southern border for months. Lawmakers want the administration to build more border walls, deploy troops, and end the disastrous catch-and-release policy that has allowed millions of people into the interior of the country.
Last June, the Republican Homeland Security Committee released a fact sheet calling the Southwest border "a historic national security crisis."
"With more than 1.5 million known gotaways under this administration, there is no way to know how many more potential national security threats, violent criminals, and hardened gang members are now at large in our country. Not only are more suspected terrorists attempting to cross our Southwest border, but encounters of Chinese nationals have also increased over 1,200 percent compared to May 2022," the fact sheet said.
