Those Illegal Jordanians Who Tried to Breach the Gate at Quantico? Feds Can't Be Bothered With Them

AP Photo/Steve Helber

This is obviously a story near and dear to my mean Marine Corps green heart, and I sure remember being torqued about the event when it happened this past May.

The two people whom the Marine Corps prevented from breaking onto an installation in Virginia on May 3 were Jordanian nationals, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Criminal Investigations Division of Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, arrested the pair for trespassing and notified ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, or ERO, office in Washington, office spokesperson James Covington told Marine Corps Times in a statement Thursday.

Deportation officers arrested the two people, whom Covington described as “Jordanian noncitizens.”

“Both individuals will remain in ERO custody pending removal proceedings,” Covington said.

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..The White House tightlipped about whether either is on the terror watch list...

The White House (but, notably, nothing out of their BORDER CZAR) would remain "tight-lipped" for another couple of days, trying to dodge the incoming fire while doing damage control as they were also in the midst of another unprecedented surge of illegals pouring over the southern border.

Serious questions immediately arose with very few answers available from Biden officials. Was this a dry run for ISIS? Al Qaeda? What about that "terror watch list - anybody check?

And, say...how did these two Jordanians get here to begin with?

OH

Homeland Republicans Probe DHS, FBI, DOD on Attempted Breach of Marine Corps Base by Jordanian Nationals in U.S. Illegally

...In the letter, the Chairmen write,The Committee on Homeland Security (Committee) is investigating the attempted breach of Marine Corps Base Quantico (MCB Quantico) by two individuals on May 3, 2024. According to public reports, two men drove a truck to the main gate of MCB Quantico, where guards attempted to redirect the truck after the two men could not provide access credentials. The driver ignored the guards’ orders, and moved the truck forward until officers stopped the truck by deploying vehicle denial barriers. The two individuals were subsequently detained and turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Reporting suggests that one occupant of the truck is a Jordanian foreign national who recently crossed the U.S. Southwest border and one occupant is on a federal terrorist watchlist. It is unclear if the descriptions apply to the same occupant.”

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It turns out that's a "yes" to all questions. 

Yes, Joe Biden let the one guy wander in illegally over the border who "yes" was on the terror watch list, while the other possible terrorist overstayed his visa, knowing no one would be looking for him.

Easy, peezy for terrorists, but just dang awkward for POTATUS at the time. which is why the administration threw a smothering blanket over any information about the attempted breach.

POOF

After a week, the national media made sure the story went away. Americans and the journalists who cared to keep asking still didn't know even as much as the perpetrators' namesI Schlitz you not. 

It wasn't that folks stopped demanding to know who these two were - there were FOIA requests flying. The embargo on information had more to do with an interesting policy statement. According to the Biden administration, even terrorist suspects caught in the act have a right to privacy when it comes to releasing their names.

Their names weren't released until...yesterday. Even then, they were uncovered, not provided.

The Biden administration has refused answer reporters’ questions, rule out terrorism, or even reveal the names of two Jordanians in the country illegally, one of whom had illegally crossed the U.S. Southwest border, who on May 3 conducted a box truck ramming attack on Quantico Marine Corps Base.

The Department of Justice, Department of Defense, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the FBI all circled wagons to guard even the identities of the two Jordanians against five written congressional inquiries, a sixth by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin seeking government briefings about the incident, and most recently a subpoena by the Republican-led House Homeland Security Committee of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Government lawyers went so far as to refuse a Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) Freedom of Information Act request on grounds that releasing their names was a “clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy and of “minimal public interest” despite the congressional and media inquiries that reached a May 16 White House press briefing where President Biden’s spokesperson refused to answer.

But a systematic search of federal court records by the Center has now turned up the names of the men as Hasan Y. Hamdan and Mohammad K. Dabous. The records also provide an indication of at least what the federal government has done with them since their May 3 arrests, though stop short of why they tried to ram a truck into the military base or how they came to be in Virginia. While one Jordanian illegally crossed the border a month before the incident, the other reportedly overstayed a student visa he'd been issued but never used.

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Oddly enough, as releases go, these two failed terrorists were released from custody at the same time.

Again, I Schlitz you not. 

They're free on bail. They've signed papers for the judge promising to make all their court appearances.

Pinky swear!

The two illegal Jordanian migrants who are charged with trying to breach Marine Corps Base Quantico in May posted thousands of dollars in bail and were allowed to leave federal custody, The Post can exclusively reveal.

Hasan Yousef Hamdan, 32, and Mohammad Khair Dabous, 28, were released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention despite their immigration status — Hamdan had crossed into the country illegally in April and Dabous had overstayed his student visa and is subject to removal proceedings, law enforcement sources told The Post.

They were arrested on May 3 for trespassing onto the military installation and handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers because of their immigration statuses.

...“Big-time intel failure, security failure,” a federal law enforcement source told The Post.

“If it wasn’t an act of terrorism, why aren’t the government officials releasing the details of this? What was the intent?”

The men both posted bond in their ICE cases — with Hamdan’s set at $15,000 and Dabous’ set at $10,000 — and were released in early June, according to federal law enforcement sources.

When you read more about the details of the breach at Quantico, you have to wonder why the Biden administration protected these two and has now released them. And they have allowed it. Without the feds' blessing, those two would still be sitting in jail, like...I dunno. Any Jan 6 grandmother or pro-life abortion clinic protester, for sure.

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VURT DA FURK

...When they were unable to provide any credentials, guards Instructed to pull over to a secondary inspection area for further questioning.

That was when the driver hit the gas and tried to plow through onto the base despite halt orders, media reports quoting anonymous sources said. Initially, the sources said one of the two Jordanians was on the FBI terrorism watch list, a claim that another anonymous source later disputed in a different media report.

Either way, the men would have succeeded in penetrating into the base interior except that guards deployed vehicle denial barriers.

The administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid characterizing motivations for the incident or do what most interested parties want: rule out the incident as an attempted terror attack by an illegal border-crosser.

A private attorney listed as representing Hasan Hamdan, Dwight Everette Crawley, quickly declined comment to the Center in a phone call. Crawley’s website says he is a former prosecutor-turned criminal defense trial attorney who has represented defendants in capital murder cases.

“I don’t discuss clients. Thanks for your time,” Crawley said, hanging up, when asked if he’d discuss this client. 

For reasons not clear, DOJ attorneys – unusually, for such cases – did not file their charges in court for many weeks after the incident became news, not until July 9, in the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria. That’s more than two months after the arrests, when media interest had waned.

Because the government refused to release names of the arrested people on supposed privacy grounds and ostensible absence of any public interest, and also delayed filing court papers for more than two months, a systematic search in the Alexandria federal court building did not uncover the public court case records

On July 22, when both Jordanians showed up for an “initial appearance” before a magistrate judge, ordinarily held quickly to advise arrested people of their rights and to inform them of additional hearings to come, no independent observers were present.

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What in the Sam hell is going on here?

...But the transcripts also show that, more than 10 weeks after their arrests, federal prosecutors were amenable to support their releases on a promise that they would appear for future hearings.

Pinky swear, the two will be back in court on the 17th of September.

There's been nothing on the subject from she-wasn't-the-Border-Czar Harris on this interesting development, but someone ought to keep an ear to the ground on it. If these two upstanding illegal gate-crashers skip out on the court date, it would make another fine campaign bone to gnaw on. 

God forbid the pair takes it upon themselves to borrow another van in the meantime, not that a single soul in the Biden-Harris administration would care anyway.

"Nothing could be farther from the truth," you know - especially around election time when it's so important to smother it.

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Ed Morrissey 12:40 PM | November 21, 2024
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