A Lebanese national who entered the U.S. illegally during the Biden administration and confessed to being a Hezbollah operative with intentions of constructing an explosive device waited almost a year before receiving deportation orders, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) told The NY Post.
Now, under the Trump administration, efforts are underway to ensure his removal from the country.
Basel Bassel Ebbadi, a 22-year-old migrant en route to New York, was apprehended by border agents in El Paso, Texas, on March 9, 2024. Upon being taken into custody, he admitted his connection to Hezbollah and his aspirations. He was immediately placed in federal detention.
While undergoing a medical assessment at a processing center, Ebbadi was questioned about his reasons for coming to the United States. In response, he stated, “I’m going to try to make a bomb,” as documented in a Border Patrol report previously obtained by The Post.
ICE took Ebbadi into custody nearly a week after his capture, issuing an “order of expedited removal,” according to the agency.
However, bureaucratic complications and a subsequent prison sentence delayed his deportation proceedings, and it was only recently that an official order for his removal was granted.
Following his illegal entry into the country, Ebbadi was convicted and sentenced on April 26 to five months in a federal penitentiary.
After serving his sentence, he was transferred back to ICE custody, where an immigration judge officially ordered his deportation on January 13.
Despite the ruling, Ebbadi remains detained by ICE and has yet to be removed from the United States.
After being caught at the border, he claimed in an interview that he sought to escape both Hezbollah and Lebanon because he “didn’t want to kill people,” explaining that “once you’re in, you can never get out.”
Ebbadi disclosed that he had undergone seven years of Hezbollah training and later spent four years serving as an armed guard for the terrorist organization.
He stated that his instruction focused on “jihad” and eliminating non-Muslims.
At the time of his illegal entry, Ebbadi did not possess any identification, asserting that his documents had been stolen at knifepoint in Costa Rica.
Under the Biden administration, border authorities apprehended nearly 400 individuals suspected of terrorism attempting to cross the southern border unlawfully. However, due to the sheer volume of migrants, many others evaded detection.
In a separate case, an Al-Shabaab terrorist from Somalia was released by Border Patrol and remained at large in the U.S. for close to a year before ICE corrected the error and arrested him in Minnesota.
Additionally, the Trump administration continues efforts to track down over 100 suspected ISIS-affiliated migrants who entered the country illegally and were freed under Biden’s policies.
To curb these security lapses, the Trump administration has eliminated the controversial “catch and release” approach, which had previously enabled millions of migrants to move freely throughout the country.
{Matzav.com}The post Admitted Hezbollah Terrorist Finally Set To Be Deported — A Year After He Crossed Border And Said He ‘Hoped To Make A Bomb’ first appeared on Matzav.com.