8 with suspected ISIS ties arrested in Philly, New York and Los Angeles

Eight foreign nationals with suspected ties to ISIS were arrested in recent days in a series of coordinated raids in Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles, authorities said.

But officials have remained tight-lipped on the identities of the people detained and the circumstances that brought them to the attention of investigators.

A law enforcement source familiar with the matter said all of those arrested initially hailed from Tajikistan in Central Asia and crossed into the United States illegally via the Southern border in 2023. They were allowed to remain in the country temporarily, pending asylum claims, after preliminary vetting uncovered no national security concerns.

However, subsequent information surfaced indicating that the men may have had some affiliation with the terrorist organization, said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect the ongoing investigation.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the FBI would not say how many people were arrested in Philadelphia or where and when those arrests took place.

Those detained as part of the investigation, which was first reported by the New York Post, have not been charged with terrorism-related crimes and are instead being held on immigration violations, authorities said.

“The individuals arrested are in ICE custody pending removal proceedings,” the agencies said in a joint statement.

For months, counterterrorism officials have raised increasing alarm about the rise of a Central Asian-based ISIS offshoot and the United States’ potential vulnerability to terrorists sneaking across the U.S.-Mexico border.

In March, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned the Senate Intelligence Committee that a human smuggling operation with ties to terrorism-affiliated organizations had been assisting migrants to illegally enter the country through Mexico.

“There is a particular network where some of the overseas facilitators of the smuggling network have ISIS ties that we’re very concerned about and we’ve been spending enormous amounts of effort with our partners investigating,” he said. “Exactly what that network is up to is something that’s, again, the subject of our current investigation.”

CNN reported last year that more than a dozen migrants from Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries had illegally crossed the Southern border in early 2023 with the assistance of a Turkish smuggler with ties to ISIS, setting off an FBI investigation to track them down and identify whether any of them had terrorist ties.

It was not clear whether the eight Tajik migrants arrested in the recent Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles raids were connected to the same network.

NBC News reported Tuesday that the information that led to their arrests emerged from the same investigation that resulted in the apprehension in March of a 33-year-old Uzbek man living in Baltimore with suspected ISIS ties. His arrest came more than two years after he’d first illegally entered the country and been allowed to remain in the United States with a pending asylum claim.

Meanwhile, counterterrorism officials continue to warn that despite its defeat by a global coalition and the end of its caliphate in Syria and Iraq in 2019, ISIS remains a threat to U.S. national security.

A branch of ISIS, Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K) has gained a foothold in Central Asia and, according to an April report from the New York Times, draws more than half of its recruits from Tajikistan.

Tajik loyalists to the organization have played high-profile roles in several recent terror strikes, including a March attack on a Moscow concert hall that left 145 people dead.