The Trump administration is set to deport an illegal migrant who made “terroristic threats” almost a year after border officials arrested him.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) secured a judge’s deportation order for Lebanese migrant Basel Bassel Ebbadi days before President Donald Trump took office, the New York Post reported. Ebbadi told federal agents he belonged to the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah and came to the U.S. “to try to make a bomb” when he was first arrested in March 2024 as the Biden administration dealt with record numbers of illegal migrants who posed potential national security threats.
Ebbadi received a five-month prison sentence in April 2024 for illegally crossing the border, but ICE still did not obtain a final deportation order in court until Jan. 13 despite aiming for “expedited removal,” according to the Post.
Upon his arrest, Ebaddi told border agents a seemingly contradictory story that he left Hezbollah because he didn’t want to kill non-Muslims as the Iran-backed Islamist group had trained him to do — yet he came to America to make an explosive device. Interrogators determined he had made “terroristic threats to personnel” over the course of the discussions, the New York Post reported.
ICE’s media office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation. ICE’s inmate database shows Ebbadi is in custody in El Paso, Texas as of Wednesday.
Ebbadi’s arrest came after agencies warned in October that Hezbollah and other groups could be sending operatives across the southern border to threaten the U.S. in response to the Israel-Hamas war. Record numbers of migrants on the terrorist watchlist were caught illegally entering the U.S. under former President Joe Biden’s permissive border policies, totaling at least 382.
In one case, agents caught and unwittingly released an al-Shabaab terrorist who roamed the U.S. for ten months before being arrested again.
Trump’s officials have prioritized deporting migrants with the most serious criminal connections in his first few weeks in office. ICE caught at least two suspected terrorists within the first week.
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