by Nicole Robinson
On a quiet Friday morning on May 3, two men posing as subcontracted Amazon drivers pulled their truck up to the main gate entering Quantico Marine Base in Virginia.
The men did not present approved access credentials and had no affiliation with the base. They claimed they were making a delivery to the post office.
Following standard protocol, the gate officers directed the truck to a holding area for extra vetting, but the driver ignored the order and tried to breach the gate. Luckily, vehicle denial barriers prevented the truck from getting on base.
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The two drivers were detained and eventually handed over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They were later identified as Jordanian nationals. One of the men was living illegally in the United States on an expired student visa while the other had only recently crossed the U.S. border in San Diego.
Almost a month later, there are still a lot of unanswered questions in this case. For instance, the identities of the men have still not been revealed. The Department of Homeland Security refuses to share who these men are, citing privacy concerns for asylum-seekers.
Doesn’t the public have a right to know who these uninvited guests are, given the obvious threat they present to national security?
Most importantly, why did it take almost two weeks for base officials to notify personnel of the security breach?
Curiously, the public found out about the incident on May 10 only after a local reporter broke the story.
The reporter was acting on a tip from Matt Strickland, a Virginia politician who ran for state Senate in 2023. Strickland had received a message from a Quantico employee about the attempted breach. The message stated that the man who had crossed the border was on the terrorism watchlist, a claim that has not been confirmed by authorities.
Republican members of Congress and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued letters to President Joe Biden and Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas requesting a full briefing on the incident but no new details have emerged.
This is not the first time foreign nationals have attempted to breach sensitive military facilities.
In an interview with Fox News on May 24, Navy Adm. Daryl Caudle stated that these incidents are “happening more and more, something that we see two or three times a week.”
Many of these individuals attempting to enter military bases are from Russia and China.
In other cases, foreign nationals have targeted high-ranking U.S. military officials.
On the same day as the Quantico incident, two Chechen men were caught taking photos outside the family home of a U.S. Army colonel in a neighborhood close to Fort Liberty, North Carolina. The immigration status of both men remains unconfirmed.
This is not an isolated incident. Many U.S. special operations soldiers around the country have reported suspicious surveillance of them and their families.
While some of these incidents may be tied to espionage, many experts fear that they are dry runs in preparation for targeted attacks against military personnel or larger terrorist attacks on government facilities or military bases.
FBI Director Christopher Wray has even warned of a potential attack.
“I’ve never seen a time where all the threats or so many of the threats are all elevated, all at exactly the same time … I see blinking lights everywhere I turn,” Wray said in December.
These incidents are directly tied to the Biden administration’s open border policies.
From 2017 to 2020, border agents recorded a total of 14 encounters with terror watchlist individuals between ports of entry along both the U.S. northern and southern border.
After three years of the Biden administration, that number has jumped to a total of 286 encounters. This is a 2,500% increase in known encounters over three years.
These numbers do not reflect the number of individuals that were either never caught or were not on the terrorism watchlist.
Poor vetting procedures combined with the overwhelming stream of illegal migrants across the border increases the risk that bad actors slip through.
On March 9 near El Paso, Texas, U.S. Border Patrol caught a Lebanese national named Basel Bassel Ebbadi who claimed to be part of Hezbollah.
In an interview with authorities, Ebbadi stated that he had trained with Hezbollah for seven years and was headed to New York City to make a bomb. He was on no terrorism watchlist and therefore could have been released if he had kept quiet about his ties to terrorism.
What is the Biden administration doing about it? In the first week of June Biden signed an executive order that temporarily suspends the entry of illegal entrants, “when the Southern border is overwhelmed.”
Setting aside the subjective nature and loopholes in the executive order, it does nothing to address the over 1.5 million “gotaways” or the over 5.4 million illegal crossings logged by U.S. Customs and Border Protection since Biden took office in 2021.
Incidents like the one in Quantico and near Fort Liberty are only the beginning.
Red lights are indeed blinking, and it may be too late to stop an attack from happening on the homeland.
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Nicole Robinson is a senior research associate in the Allison Center for Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation.
