John Wagner, a deputy assistant commissioner at the Department of Homeland Security, said during testimony before the Senate Homeland and Governmental Affairs Committee that U.S. security and screening measures would have stopped some of the known attackers from traveling to the United States.
Asked whether the Paris attackers, who were European Union citizens, would “have been stopped at the border of the U.S. based on what we have right now,” Wagner was confident “some of them would have.”
“Some of them would have been prevented from traveling here to begin with,” he said. “It’s been reported some of them were identified to governments as being a national security risk already. There’s information we would have received from their travel details that we’re confidence we would have identified had they travelled to the U.S.”
Wagner declined to go into further detail about this in a public setting but told lawmakers that current detection methods likely would have flagged a few of the known attackers.
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