AP sources: 8 people with possible links to Islamic State arrested in the US for immigration violations

WASHINGTON (AP) — In recent days, eight people from Tajikistan with suspected ties to the Islamic State group have been arrested in the United States, according to several people familiar with the matter.

The arrests took place in New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. The people, who entered the U.S. through the southern border, are being held for immigration violations, said the people, who were not authorized to speak by name about the ongoing investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

The nature of their alleged ties to ISIS was not immediately clear, but the individuals were being tracked by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). They were in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which made the arrests as part of its cooperation with the JTTF, pending proceedings to deport them from the country.

The individuals, who are from Tajikistan, entered the country last spring and went through the U.S. government’s vetting process without any information surfacing that identified them as a potential terrorism risk, said one of the people familiar with the matter.

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security confirmed in a statement the immigration-related arrests of “several non-citizens” but did not elaborate on the details. Authorities pointed out that the United States is in a “heightened threat situation.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray said the United States faces an increasing threat from domestic violent extremists as well as foreign terrorist organizations, particularly after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

At a recent congressional hearing, he said officials were “concerned about the terrorist implications that could result from potential attacks on vulnerabilities at the border.” The Biden administration in August stated that it had discovered and stopped a network attempting to smuggle people from Uzbekistan to the United States, and that at least one member of the network had ties to a foreign terrorist group.

“The FBI and DHS will continue to work with our partners around the clock to identify, investigate, and disrupt potential national security threats,” the authorities said.