Did illegal border crossers from the Middle East try to attack a U.S. military base?
In the early morning hours of May 3, two men in a box truck pulled up to the front gate of the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia, claiming they were Amazon delivery men.
Military Police, who were skeptical of their story, directed the two men to an area for secondary security inspection. Instead, the driver hit the gas and tried to ram the truck into the base’s town center. MPs put up road barriers that stopped the truck.
One of the men was a Jordanian national who had crossed the U.S. southern border illegally. One was on the U.S. terrorist watch list.
Yet the incident has gone largely unreported. What is known is due in great part to the reporting of Kelly Sienkowski of the Potomac Local News.
"To date, the government will only confirm the border-crossing Jordanian joined with another illegally present Jordanian, who overstayed a student visa, and together posed as Amazon deliverymen in a large box truck, then tried to plow it through the gates of Quantico, which houses the FBI training academy, military officer training schools, and military criminal investigations and intelligence commands," Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies wrote on May 28.
Team Biden "and all involved agencies have essentially confirmed one of America’s worst — and most politically consequential — nightmares related to the ongoing border crisis. A terror attack emanating from an illegal Southwest Border crossing just happened, and since that precedent is now established, more are likely on the way," Bensman noted.
Retired CIA officer Sam Faddis reported in his substack column that "members of both the House and the Senate and the Governor of Virginia are now demanding details and answers. None have been forthcoming from the administration to date.
Faddis continued:
The most disturbing thing about the incident at Quantico perhaps is that it did not occur in isolation. It is part of a much larger pattern in which individuals have attempted to enter secure installations around the country.
Two days after the incident at Quantico an individual crashed his vehicle into the gate at the White House. He died in the crash.
In late April a vehicle attempted to drive onto Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story in Virginia Beach. The driver crashed and also died in the attempt.
In late March a Chinese national attempted to gain access to the Marine base at Twenty-Nine Palms. He was stopped and detained. As of late 2023, there had been at least 100 instances of Chinese nationals trying to get onto secure American military installations without proper authorization.
These are the specific instances that have been reported in the news. They appear to be the tip of the iceberg. The US Fleet Forces Commander Admiral Daryl Caudle recently told FOX News that there are two to three instances of foreign nationals attempting to penetrate U.S. military bases every week.
Since the 9/11 attacks "federal authorities and the American people have enjoyed a kind of public compact that now stands broken," Bensman wrote. "It is that the government almost always clarifies to the American public whether its top counterterrorism professionals regard initially ambiguous attacks as motivated by international or domestic terrorism — or not — and often a thumbs up or down as to whether the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force was investigating."The Biden administration has broken with the post-9/11 tradition.
"I believe the reason Biden’s people won’t acknowledge the first-ever border-crossing terror attack attempts to serve political aims, at the expense of public safety. They know that acknowledging a terror attack from the border crisis would further damage a Biden re-election campaign that is already suffering dearly from it," Bensman wrote. "Any official acknowledgement that it was done for the global jihad delivers a giant new sledgehammer at the doorstep of Trump’s campaign headquarters."
But Team Biden has not yet gone as far as to rule out terrorism in the May 3 incident.
"I believe the Biden administration won’t rule out terrorism because they know the May 3 attempted truck ramming was a terrorism attack, and officials are not willing to risk impugning themselves by publicly saying otherwise," Bensman wrote.
The Department of Defense, FBI, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have all refused to rule out terrorism as a motive.
“ICE confirms attack on Quantico; Ignores questions on terrorist threat”, reads the headline on one of Sienkowski’s follow-up reports a full 14 days after the terror attack. Fox News’ Doug Doocy got the same response when he asked the ICE commissioner the question. An FBI spokesperson in the northern Virginia field office refused to confirm or deny investigative interest in the matter, Sienkowski told Bensman in a phone interview.
Not even the White House would reap the advantage of an official “terrorism-ruled-out” when Fox News’s Doocy pressed White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre if the White House would characterize what happened as a “failed terror attack”.
“Given that it is an active law enforcement matter, I would have to refer you to ICE,” Jean-Pierre replied. “I just can’t dive into that, again, because there is a law enforcement matter.”
That dodge, Bensman noted, "is, in my view, as good as confirmation, considering all the circumstances."
"Finally," Bensman continued, "I know this was a terror attack — the first ever by an extremist border-crosser from the Middle East — because Karine Jean-Pierre and all these agencies are in lockstep on the messaging and strategy of neither confirming nor denying or ruling out terrorism. That means a whole lot of high-level talking and coordination went on because ... they know it was a terror attack and that great electoral danger resides in that reality."
