The group of Tajik migrants with suspected ties to ISIS had been planning an attack on an LGBTQ establishment in Philadelphia and looked to target “infidels” before they were pinched in June, The Post has learned.
The eight terror suspects from Tajikistan crossed the southern border, some using the Harris-Biden administration’s CBP One phone app, and federal agents didn’t uncover any information suggesting terrorism ties, sources said.
They were nabbed as part of a multi-state sting that spanned New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles — with one of the suspects caught on wiretap talking about bombs, sources previously said.
But it later emerged that the group had also planned the attack in the City of Brotherly Love, a Congressional source told The Post, without elaborating. A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement source also said that the group had been discussing targeting “infidels” in the US.
It is not clear how the group planned to carry out the attack or its exact location.
Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor the FBI responded to The Post’s requests for comment.
Months before the arrests, FBI Director Chris Wray warned of the possibility that ISIS could be exploiting an open southern border.
He had also expressed concerns to lawmakers of the possibility of a “coordinated attack” that could take place on US soil following an ISIS-K attack on a concert hall in Moscow — carried out by citizens of Tajikistan — that killed 145 people and wounded hundreds more.
ISIS-K, which stands for Islamic State Khorasan, a region in South Asia, is an offshoot of the Islamic State terror organization.
“Our most immediate concern has been that individuals or small groups will draw twisted inspiration from the events in the Middle East to carry out attacks here at home,” Wray told a House Appropriations subcommittee.
“But now, increasingly concerning is the potential for a coordinated attack here in the homeland, akin to the ISIS-K attack we saw at the Russia concert hall a couple weeks ago.”
Wray had also earlier disclosed to the Senate Intelligence Committee that a human smuggling operation with ties to terrorists from ISIS-affiliated groups was operating at the southern border.
“I want to be a little bit careful how far I can go in open session, but there is a particular network that, where some of the overseas facilitators of the smuggling network have ISIS ties that we’re very concerned about and that we’ve been spending enormous amount of effort with our partners investigating,” the FBI director said in response to a question from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).
“Exactly what that network is up to is something that’s, again, the subject of our current investigation,” he added.
The FBI was also probing a smuggling ring where a Turkish smuggler tied to ISIS helped dozens of migrants from Uzbekistan cross the US-Mexico border, CNN reported last August.
Border Patrol agents have caught a record number of migrants crossing the southern border illegally whose names appear on the terror watchlist in recent years, with such encounters jumping from 11 in the financial years 2017 through 2020 to 382 between financial years 2021 and August 2024, according to federal data.
As migrants poured across the southern border in unprecedented numbers under the Harris-Biden administration, federal authorities accidentally allowed several migrants with known or suspected terror ties to slip through the cracks.
One of them was Mohammad Kharwin, 48, who crossed the California border illegally in March 2023 and was freed into the US before the feds realized his suspected terror ties.
It took nearly a year for the FBI to notify ICE that Kharwin was a suspected member of the US-designated foreign terror group Hezb-e-Islami.
He was then arrested in February, but let go a second time by a judge who was unaware of the alleged terrorist’s background before authorities scrambled and rearrested him yet again.
Border agents also released a 27-year-old Somali national, who has not been identified by name, despite him being a “confirmed member of al Shabaab,” a designated terror organization, ICE earlier admitted.
The man who was said to be “involved in the use, manufacture or transportation of explosives or firearms,” was released after crossing the border in California illegally in March 2023.
ICE didn’t nab him for almost a year in Minnesota.
Border Patrol agents themselves have said they are releasing terrorists and criminals into the country because they don’t have enough time or background information to effectively vet border crossers.
“What you’re seeing now is only gonna get worse,” one Border Patrol agent previously told The Post.