The situation at the southern border has the FBI on alert for dangerous individuals entering the United States, the director said.
The surge of illegal immigrants across the southern border has yielded “very dangerous threats” for the United States, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified on March 11.
While being questioned by members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mr. Wray confirmed that a variety of “dangerous individuals” had entered the United States via the U.S.–Mexico border.
When asked by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the committee’s vice chair, if those individuals were committing crimes, the director elaborated.
“From an FBI perspective, we are seeing a wide array of very dangerous threats that emanate from the border,” including the cross-border trafficking of drugs such as fentanyl, he said. “And an awful lot of the violent crime in the United States is at the hands of gangs who are themselves involved in the distribution of that fentanyl.”
And when pressed on whether members of violent gangs and other criminal organizations had entered the country and were now committing crimes, Mr. Wray acknowledged that they were.
Without revealing specifics, the director also disclosed that the FBI is “very concerned” about a particular human smuggling network whose overseas facilitators have ties to ISIS. The bureau, he said, is currently working with foreign partners to investigate the group.
Recent Violent Crime
Mr. Wray appeared on Capitol Hill to testify on worldwide threats alongside a panel of other intelligence chiefs. His comments come on the heels of multiple violent crimes that were allegedly committed by illegal immigrants. One such crime was the Jan. 27 attack on two New York Police Department officers in Times Square by a group of illegal immigrants. At least two of the suspects charged with the assault are confirmed members of the violent Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang.
That event was followed weeks later by the brutal slaying of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student, on the University of Georgia campus.
Ms. Riley went out for a jog on Feb. 22 and never returned home. Her body, which was disfigured by blunt force trauma to her skull, was found later that day in a wooded area near the school’s intramural fields. Police arrested suspect Jose Ibarra the next day. Mr. Ibarra is a 26-year-old Venezuelan national who entered the United States illegally in 2022.
