By Todd Bensman on October 11, 2024

AColombian national on the FBI’s terrorist watch list who illegally crossed the U.S. Southwest border and was accidentally released for weeks into the interior is the latest addition to the Center for Immigration Studies’ National Security Vetting Failures database.

In March 2023, the Center published the database collection to draw “remedial attention” to ongoing government vetting failures lest they “drift from the public mind and interest of lawmakers, oversight committee members, media, and homeland security practitioners who would otherwise feel compelled to demand process reforms”, according to an explanatory Center report titled “Learning from our Mistakes”.

The latest addition is a Colombian border-crosser who became the subject of a June 2023 Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General report titled “CBP Released a Migrant on a Terrorist Watchlist, and ICE Faced Information Sharing Challenges Planning and Conducting the Arrest”. The OIG report does not name the suspected terrorist or his group affiliation, but earlier news reports based on a leaked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) memorandum exactly mirror the later DHS OIG report’s entry and recapture details and name him as Isnardo Garcia-Amado.

What’s more, in its response to the OIG findings, DHS administration officials seemed to suggest the Colombian was associated with the Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC), the main body of which was “de-designated” as a foreign terrorist organization just a few months earlier, in December 2021. However, many former FARC members are still considered dangerous and remain on the watch list while two FARC splinter groups remain designated terrorist organizations, including the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP) and a rival of FARC-EP, the Segunda Marquetalia. Both groups partake in bombings, violence against civilians, kidnappings, attacks on utilities, and against military and police facilities, according to the U.S. State Department.

The news reports from 2022 state that Border Patrol agents encountered Garcia-Amado on April 18, 2022, near Yuma, Ariz., and quickly released him with a GPS monitoring device as an alternative to detention, a policy commonly used all along the U.S. southern border then and now to release millions of illegal border-crossers since 2021.

Garcia-Amado crossed among record-breaking 30,000 immigrants crossing per month in the Border Patrol’s Yuma Sector at the time through an unfinished, cancelled section of the earlier Trump administration border wall known locally as “the Yuma gap”.

The OIG report stated that Border Patrol agents ran the Colombian’s name through national security databases, which initially flagged him — inconclusively — as a suspected terrorist on the watch list.

But the report states that because border agents “were busy processing an increased flow of migrants” who were clogging the area’s central processing center at the time, agents released the suspect into the interior before the inconclusive alert could be resolved, which normally would happen quickly under established inter-agency routines.

Instead, under the pressure of processing historic numbers of illegal aliens pouring through the Yuma Sector all that spring (28,681 that April, compared to 298 in the same month in 2020), Border Patrol released the suspect with most of the rest on alternatives-to-detention policy personal recognizance, with a GPS tracking device and an honor-system promise that he voluntarily report in later to an ICE office.

Mass releases of illegal border-crossers from central processing centers (CPCs) under such circumstances have been customary all along the southern border since President Biden took office in January 2021, without letup to the present day, and are the main cause of the border crisis.

Only after CBP officers released this suspect to board a commercial flight from Palm Springs, Calif., to Tampa, Fla. — where pre-check routines confirmed the watch list hit — did agencies eventually realize the alien was a positive match on the Terrorist Watchlist. But the discovery came too late.

Not until after two more weeks of foul-ups did ICE agents track down and, on May 6, 2022, finally arrest the suspected terrorist in Tampa.

What Didn’t Happen

The OIG report lays out established government processes for handling illegal border-crossers who appear on the FBI’s terrorism watchlist.

Cases where aliens flag on the watchlist after routine national security database checks inside Border Patrol stations and processing centers are forwarded for general reporting purposes (or confirmation) to the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center in Virginia, which manages the Terrorist Screening Dataset.

Terrorist Screening Center analysts may request additional identifying information like fingerprints or copies of travel or identity documents through U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center (NTC) or contact a Mexican intelligence group known as Grupo Conjunto de Inteligencia Fronteriza that works closely with the American agencies on these cases.

Often, in the end, federal agents, including the Border Patrol’s Tactical Terrorism Response Team, get dispatched to border holding facilities for face-to-face interviews with terrorism suspects to help with confirmations and to collect intelligence information.

The report found communications breakdowns at the NTC, as well as with overwhelmed CBP agents on the ground in Yuma’s central processing center, in large part due to the pressure from a human torrent that had been underway for months.

It’s long been customary that the FBI Screening Center request that the NTC facilitate an interview with the migrant before a release.

Neither the interview nor hit confirmation happened before release, at least in part because the NTC sent the request to an incorrect email distribution list for the Border Patrol’s Tactical Terrorism Response Team, but also because those in Yuma who did receive the request were too swamped to read it.

The same interview request went successfully to the emails of supervisors working in the Border Patrol’s Yuma Sector, according to footnote 17 in the OIG report. Those Yuma supervisors never responded.

Why?

“A Yuma CPC [Central Processing Center] agent explained that he and his colleagues try to respond to NTC emails as quickly as possible but were busy processing an increased flow of migrants,” the report stated. “As a result, the Tactical Terrorism Response Team did not receive the NTC’s request and did not interview the migrant.”

Elsewhere, the report noted that central processing center agents “explained that the Yuma CPC was over capacity following an increase in apprehensions, which created pressure to quickly process migrants and decreased the time available to review each file.”

The NTC also was clearly overwhelmed at the time, which would explain two other vital communications failures. At one point, the NTC asked for — and received the critical desired information — from the Mexican intelligence group it normally works with.

But two NTC officials who received it never forwarded it and “told us they did not recall why they did not forward it”, the OIG report said.

And when the now-freed terrorist suspect flagged a second time prior to boarding the flight to Tampa, the Transportation Security Administration at the Palm Springs airport notified the NTC that the match was positive.

This set in motion an arrest plan, but the mass-migration-related foul-ups did not end there, even as the clock was ticking on a potential national security event.

More Delays by an Overwhelmed Border Patrol Added to National Risk

With the suspect free and roaming in Florida on April 22, 2022, the case went straight to ICE officers to arrest the suspect, who was supposed to voluntarily report in on June 1 of that year. ICE in Tampa changed it to an earlier date “because the migrant was a positive Terrorist Watchlist match, and the office was concerned that … the migrant could post a national security risk”.

Two other reasons are redacted.

Working with the FBI, ICE put a surveillance team on the suspect and asked for the “Alien File” from Border Patrol, which would include helpful photographs and potential evidence that would indicate whether the suspect had any history of violence or criminality.

But ICE officers couldn’t act because they didn’t get the file for eight days, even for a national security priority like this. That’s because Border Patrol’s Yuma Sector operation was unable to sort, box, and ship any more than a thousand files “once or twice a week” from that overwhelmed processing center to ICE offices across the country, the OIG report found.

They were tens of thousands behind.

One final snafu almost derailed the arrest. When the arresting ICE team showed up at the suspect’s residence and waited for the suspect to leave so they could do the arrest, they learned Border Patrol’s electronic monitoring (Alternatives to Detention) office didn’t open until 7 a.m. and also that system did not share GPS tracking information with ICE, which the team needed to confirm the suspect was in one of the vehicles that departed. The team made do by trailing the vehicle until an officer could call the ATD office when it opened at 7 a.m.

They arrested the suspect without incident at 7:30 a.m. on May 6, 2022.

The whereabouts of Isnardo Garcia-Amado today are not publicly known.

Topics: National Security