Immigration & terrorismFormer U.S. officials challenge report linking terrorism, immigration

By Jeff Seldin

Published 24 September 2018

A group of former national security officials is pushing back against a controversial Trump administration report on the link between terrorism and immigration, saying the report gives the false impression that immigrants are responsible for the majority of terrorist attacks in the United States.

A group of former national security officials is pushing back against a controversial Trump administration report on the link between terrorism and immigration, saying the report gives the false impression that immigrants are responsible for the majority of terrorist attacks in the United States.

In a letter Thursday to U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, the officials, including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, expressed concern about “misleading statements and omissions” in the January 2018 report and urged the administration to address lingering questions about them.

“Overall, the report appears designed to give the misleading impression that immigrants — and even their citizen family members — are responsible for the vast majority of terrorist attacks that have occurred in the United States, whereas statistical studies and our experience have shown no identifiable correlation between ‘foreignness’ and terrorist activity in the past 15 years,” the 18 former officials who served in both Democratic and Republican administrations wrote.

Report linked to travel ban
The report in question was released by the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security and said three in four individuals convicted of international terrorism-related charges since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were foreign born.

President Donald Trump ordered the report as part of a March 2017 directive imposing a travel ban on citizens of six predominantly Muslim countries. The directive asked for an initial report on “foreign nationals” in the United States who have been charged with terror-related offenses in the United States.

The report instead focused on “foreign born” terrorism defendants, a broader category that included 148 naturalized U.S. citizens, as well as foreign terror suspects extradited to the United States for prosecution on crimes committed overseas. It showed that 402 of 549 individuals convicted of terrorism charges in the United States between Sept. 11, 2001, and Dec. 31, 2016, were foreign born.