Over 150 have been arrested, but the whereabouts of over 50 remain unknown, officials said. ICE is looking to arrest them on immigration charges when they are found.
The Department of Homeland Security has identified over 400 immigrants from Central Asia and elsewhere who crossed into the U.S. in the past three years as “subjects of concern” because they were brought by an ISIS-affiliated human smuggling network, three U.S.
One of the U.S. officials said people affiliated with ISIS are operating as human smugglers in Central Asia and helping people there leave their countries and travel to the West, where they are then smuggled into the U.S. It is not known whether the human smuggling activity directly funds ISIS activity or whether ISIS members are making personal money through human smuggling on the side, the U.S. official said.
The official added that the U.S. has no indication that the more than 400 migrants brought to the U.S. by the network have plans to carry out terrorism in the U.S., but immigration agents are looking to arrest them out of an abundance of caution.
“In this case, it was the information that suggested a potential tie to ISIS because of some of the individuals involved in [smuggling migrants to the border] that led us to want to take extra care,” said a senior Biden administration official, “and out of an abundance of caution make sure that we exercised our authority in the most expansive and appropriate way to mitigate risk because of this potential connection being made.”
The official added that since ICE began arresting migrants brought to the U.S. by the ISIS-linked smuggling group several months ago, no information has emerged tying them to a threat to the U.S. homeland.
Many of the more than 400 migrants crossed the southern border and were released into the U.S. by Customs and Border Protection because they were not on the government’s terrorism watchlist, according to the three officials, and the agency did not have information raising concerns at the time.
But recent terrorist attacks in Russia have fueled heightened concern about ISIS and its offshoot ISIS-K. In recent months, DHS has been looking more closely at migrants from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia and Russia, countries where ISIS-K has been active.
