Lebanese national Basel Bassel Ebbadi had tried to sneak into the country and admitted wanting to kill people in New York with a bomb.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
A year to the month he was captured trying to sneak into the United States, an admitted Hezbollah terrorist is set to be deported, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) told The New York Post on Monday.
Lebanese national Basel Bassel Ebbadi, 22, was caught by border agents in El Paso, Texas, on March 9, 2024.
He had no identification, and when he was asked while undergoing routine medical screening what he was doing in the U.S, he said he wanted to get to New York, where he was “going to try to make a bomb,” according to official documents examined by the outlet.
He also said that he had “trained for jihad” for seven years and then did a four-year stint as an armed guard protecting Hezbollah assets in his home country.
This would mean that he began his terrorist training as a young child.
Ebbadi later claimed that he was seeking asylum because he “didn’t want to kill people” but was arrested and sent to an ICE facility.
Fox News reported Tuesday that he had been put in isolation there after making “terroristic threats to personnel.”
Although he was sent to ICE with an “order of expedited removal” and was a confessed member of a group designated by the U.S. and many other countries as a terrorist organization, he was soon brought to court and convicted on the single charge of illegal entry.
He served his five-month sentence in federal prison and spent the next three and a half months in ICE custody before an immigration judge reinstated the deportation order in mid-January.
It has taken a further two months for all administrative matters to be settled, and ICE expects that Ebbadi will be leaving the U.S. permanently in the very near future.
President Donald Trump came into office pledging to shut down the huge flow of unlawful migrants into the U.S., whose numbers reached the low millions under the Biden administration. Most of them came in through the country’s southern border, as did Ebbadi, and security there has been tightened considerably since Trump’s January inauguration.
Qatari-owned news outlet Al-Araby Al-Jadeed reported Sunday that the administration has also begun retroactively cancelling the visas of people who could fall under an executive order Trump signed in January that goes beyond the travel ban he had declared on seven Muslim-majority countries during his first term.
The order, called “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and other National Security and Public Safety Threats,” denies applicants visas or entry to the U.S. if they “bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles.”
