Federal law enforcement officials have arrested a man from Uzbekistan who is an alleged member of the ISIS terrorist organization and who has been living in the U.S. for the last two years while applying for asylum.
NBC News reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently arrested 33-year-old Jovokhir Attoev in Baltimore.
Attoev crossed the border in Arizona in February 2022, was apprehended by Border Patrol, and claimed he was an asylum seeker, the report said.
Officials claim that they could not find any “derogatory information” on him so they released him into the U.S. with a court date.
“Then, in May 2023, Uzbekistan put out an international notice that Attoev was wanted in his home country for his alleged affiliation with ISIS,” the report said. “But it was not until March 2024, almost a year later, when the U.S. government was reviewing Attoev’s application for asylum, that officials discovered the notice from Uzbekistan and connected it with the man living in Maryland.”
ICE arrested him two weeks ago and he now sits in jail awaiting trial in immigration court where the government will argue they need to keep him locked up to learn more about his alleged ties to terrorism.
Numerous federal law enforcement officials told the publication that the case was the perfect example of how dangerous the immigration and asylum system is in the U.S. because it takes authorities a long time to follow-up on those who have already crossed into the U.S. — usually illegally.
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ICE recently nabbed another terrorist who illegally entered the U.S. and was roaming around the country freely.
Mohammad Kharwin, 48, who illegally entered the U.S. through the southern border, “is a member of Hezb-e-Islami, or HIG, a political and paramilitary organization that the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization,” NBC News reported last month. He roamed the U.S. for a full year before finally being arrested by ICE.
The Islamic terrorist group is responsible for killing multiple American soldiers in Afghanistan from 2013 to 2015, according to U.S. officials. The Director of National Intelligence says that Hezb-e-Islami, or “Party of Islam,” is a “virulently anti-Western insurgent group whose goal is to replace the Western-backed Afghan Government with an Islamic state rooted in sharia.”