Ten years ago, Pakistani-born terrorist Tashfeen Malik and her U.S.-born husband Syed Farook murdered 14 people in an Islamist terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California. It was the deadliest foreign-born terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11 and inspired then-candidate Donald J. Trump to call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
We figured it out a long time ago: Very little was going on.
Donald Trump won the 2016 election with a victory almost unimaginable without the threat of terrorism that he and his supporters inflated at every opportunity. But terrorism was a small threat then and is even smaller today. How do I know? I’ve conducted many of the most thorough analyses of the threat of foreign-born and native-born terrorism on U.S. soil since then.
From 1975 until today, about 3,576 people have been murdered in all, not just Islamist, terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. More than 83 percent of those deaths were from the 9/11 attacks. Of those total, only 218 have been killed since the San Bernardino attack – and only 16 of them murdered by foreign-born terrorists. As tragic as each of those are, it’s a far cry from the panic that Tom Homan, the border czar under Trump, predicted.
He claimed that a 9/11 style attack is “coming” in a hysterical interview with conservative host Sean Hannity in June. A few years earlier, Homan claimed that no one was talking about the “national security crisis of immense proportions” along the border, even though it was all the political rage. And he could barely resist ending an interview by saying, “These 2 million known gotaways scare the hell out of me…I’m convinced something’s coming unless we can find them.” Illegal immigration during the Biden administration was “the biggest national security vulnerability this country’s ever seen,” he claimed.
None of Homan’s worries metastasized.
In a September 2023 hearing about illegal immigrants crossing the border to commit terrorist attacks, at which I testified, Representative Chip Roy, R-Texas, conflated that issue with the few foreign-born terrorists who have come here on visas. Representative Tom McClintock, R-California, held multiple hearings about terrorist entry through the southwest border. Both Roy and McClintock grilled me repeatedly about my simple statement that no illegal immigrant had ever crossed the border and killed somebody in an attack on U.S. soil. But I was right then and I’m still right today.
The most recent counterpoint is that the murder of a West Virginian National Guard soldier in Washington, D.C. was likely a terrorist attack, but we don’t know for sure yet. Usually, terrorists make their motives obvious. The shooter, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan immigrant who worked for CIA-funded military units in Afghanistan, entered the United States during Biden’s administration, and just got asylum from the Trump administration this year.
If Lakanwal was a terrorist, his single murder will make him the deadliest Afghan terrorist in U.S. history, despite the warnings of a massive wave of terror from the roughly 200,000 Afghans currently in the country. I wrote in 2021 that the risk of Afghan terrorism is small. That remains true today.
As much as Lakanwal deserves punishment, and we should all condemn his heinous crime, nobody should compare his crime to that of a 9/11 hijacker, and nor did he spark a national security crisis.
The United States has not been destroyed, did not suffer a wave of foreign-born terrorism, and there was not another 9/11. About 100,000 people have been murdered since Biden took office to today – compared to just four of them at the hands of foreign-born terrorists, a number so insignificant that it’s almost impossible not to overstate the risk. That number will increase to five if Lakanwal was indeed motivated by terrorism.
Of the four on the books, one was killed by a Chinese nationalist attacking Taiwanese nationalists, another was an Egyptian Islamist, and two Moldovan immigrants were killed by their son as part of a white supremacist plot to finance a revolution. In other words, there was fewer than one attack per year and none of the attackers were illegal immigrants who entered across the border. And that’s despite anger over the war in Israel and Palestine, the U.S. bombing of Iran, and periodic campaigns against the Houthis.
Murder is a vicious crime, of course, and being killed in politically motivated terrorism is particularly heinous. But the numbers do not suggest, as Trump put it, a “complete shutdown” of Muslim immigration to the United States is necessary, or even wise. So far, the president hasn’t gotten the message: Trump responded to this panic with a so-called “Muslim ban” during his first term and promptly enacted another one after being elected a second time.
The data did not support those policies the first time around. They still don’t.
Alex Nowrasteh is the senior vice president for policy at the Cato Institute.