Politics
BREAKING: Warnings Of Sleeper Cells Rise After Biden Policies
Decisions made during the Biden era may come back to haunt the U.S. following President Donald Trump’s attack on Iran, with security experts predicting “sleeper cells” may be activated to carry out domestic terrorist attacks.
Lone wolfs living and working in the U.S. may be waiting for orders from the Iranian government before inflicting death and destruction, say former government officials who blame the Biden-Harris administration for its lenient border policies that allowed suspected individuals to claim asylum or escape custody.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Sunday issued a memo through its National Terrorism Advisory System warning of a “heightened threat environment in the United States.”
The bulletin did not cite any specific threats, but it comes as Iranian officials have vowed to retaliate after a dozen U.S. super-bombs may have obliterated the country’s nuclear enrichment facilities.
“The likelihood of violent extremists in the Homeland independently mobilizing to violence in response to the conflict would likely increase if the Iranian leadership issued a religious ruling calling for retaliatory violence against targets in the Homeland,” the bulletin states.
“It is our duty to keep the nation safe and informed, especially during times of conflict,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “The ongoing Israel-Iran conflict brings the possibility of increased threat to the homeland in the form of possible cyberattacks, acts of violence, and antisemitic hate crimes.”
The document points to antiterrorism officials disrupting “multiple potentially lethal Iranian-backed plots” since 2020.
Chris Swecker, a former assistant director with the FBI, told Fox News that the Trump administration is playing “serious catch-up” to try and determine whether any illegal entries during the Biden-era may be taking orders from Iran.
“Because of the open borders, we are at a serious catch-up phase” Swecker said. “We don’t know where those thousand Iranians are and who knows how many others got across the border. We missed an opportunity when they caught and released those thousand. We missed the opportunity to gather intel by interviewing them and thoroughly vetting them. We just simply let them go, which is gross negligence on the part of the Biden administration.”
Over 1,200 Iranian nationals arrived in the U.S. under former President Joe Biden, White House border czar Tom Homan told Fox host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday. Not all of those individuals can be accounted for, raising the likelihood that an imminent act of terrorism could occur.
“The challenge that the United States has had after a very long period of time, [is that] we had an open border,” Michael Balboni, former Homeland Security advisor for New York state and a cybersecurity expert, told Fox News Digital. “Tens of millions of people came across and we don’t know who they are, where they came from, what their capabilities are or their intentions.”
The FBI in recent years has warned that the greatest danger posed to the U.S. is presently from within, citing homegrown terrorism attacks that have been perpetrated with firearms, vehicles, and improvised explosive devices.
“There’s a certain population of Iranians in the U.S. that we know about, but there’s thousands and thousands that we don’t know about because of the open border situation,” Swecker said. “The Bureau was concentrating their resources on so-called domestic terrorists like white supremacists and right-wing extremists, and calling them the most serious terrorist threat to this country when it was absolutely the international terrorists that should have been the focus of the bureau’s efforts.”
The possibility of an Iranian-backed attack nearly became reality last year when FBI officials arrested two members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and two U.S. nationals who were tasked with trying to assassinate President Trump during the campaign. The Islamic nation’s leadership has targeted Trump ever since the 2020 drone strike that killed General Qasem Soleimani.
“The Iranians have shown a pretty good capability in terms of their intelligence apparatus and their operatives being able to work clandestinely,” Balboni said. “They are fairly sophisticated when it comes to that, very determined. The question is how many are in the country and the answer is we don’t know.”
“They’re not going to quit,” Swecker said. “They will never quit. And this was the right thing to do to take out their nuclear capabilities.”
