Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in which Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four flights—crashing one into each of New York City’s Twin Towers, another into the Pentagon, and the fourth into a field in Pennsylvania—a whopping 580 people have been convicted of terrorism in the United States. An even more astonishing 380 of them were foreign-born, according to a release by the office of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and a new report from Fox News.
The Department of Justice, Sessions’ subcommittee—the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest—uncovered that the Department of Justice has kept a list showing that 580 individuals have been convicted of terrorism-related activities in the United States between Sept. 11, 2001, and Dec. 31, 2014. The list is presumably longer if the past couple years, from Dec. 31, 2014, to present, were included. Of those 580, Sessions’ subcommittee uncovered, at least 380 such individuals were foreign born—meaning they got into the United States either through illegal immigration or via a U.S. government-allowed legal immigration or visa program or refugee program.
“Using this list, the Subcommittee conducted open-source research and determined that at least 380 of the 580 were foreign-born (71 were confirmed natural-born, and the remaining 129 are not known),” Sessions’ committee uncovered. “Of the 380 foreign-born, at least 24 were initially admitted to the United States as refugees, and at least 33 had overstayed their visas. Additionally, of those born abroad, at least 62 were from Pakistan, 28 were from Lebanon, 22 were Palestinian, 21 were from Somalia, 20 were from Yemen, 19 were from Iraq, 16 were from Jordan, 17 were from Egypt, and 10 were from Afghanistan.”
The report from Fox News’ Judson Berger, which broke earlier on Wednesday before Sessions’ subcommittee announcement, summarized the actions of several of these mostly foreign-born terrorists’ activities inside the United States. Berger wrote:
A Seattle man plotting to attack a U.S. military facility. An Atlantic City man using his ‘Revolution Muslim’ site to encourage confrontations with U.S. Jewish leaders ‘at their homes.’ An Iraq refugee arrested in January, accused of traveling to Syria to “take up arms” with terror groups. These are just a few of the hundreds of individuals in the U.S. convicted or implicated in terror-related cases since 9/11 – all included in a newly compiled congressional accounting that gives fresh insight into the true scope of the threat.
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