Fri 10 September 2021:
The United States suspects that more than four dozen Afghan evacuees could pose a national security threat, the Washington Post reported on Friday, citing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) records.
The department has been vetting the more than 60,000 evacuees who have arrived the United States over the two past weeks, and has flagged 44 of them due to their suspicious backgrounds, the report said.
The records show that 13 of those people remain in custody awaiting additional screening procedures, including interviews with the FBI and other counterterrorism experts. Another 15 of the evacuees have been sent back to transit sites in Europe and the middle East because of security concerns.
Another 16 individuals have not yet been cleared to travel to the US and remain at special transit sites overseas, the report said.
Several of the Afghans were flagged for potential links with extremists or other suspicious information that raised the concerns of US law enforcement agencies, it added.
Apart from the 44 individuals, two other Afghan evacuees were previously deported from the US after the were found to have had felony convictions, while another one was charged with grand larceny this week and is now facing deportation, the report said
Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the United States has so far admitted more than 40,000 Afghan evacuees. The Afghans are being temporarily housed at eight military facilities across the country.
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