Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told the House Homeland Security Committee that roughly 18,000 people he described as known or suspected terrorists entered the United States during the Biden administration, including about 2,000 Afghans admitted under Operation Allies Welcome following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Kent said the estimate does not include an unknown number of people who crossed the southern border illegally and criticized what he called inadequate vetting, citing a recent deadly shooting in Washington, D.C.
During testimony Thursday before the House Homeland Security Committee, Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center under President Donald Trump, said that U.S. authorities have identified roughly 18,000 people as known or suspected terrorists who entered the United States during the Biden administration.
According to a report by the Daily Wire, Kent told lawmakers that of those 18,000 individuals, about 2,000 were Afghans who came to the United States under Operation Allies Welcome, the Biden-era program that brought tens of thousands of Afghans to the country after the 2021 troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, and that the remaining roughly 16,000 entered through other channels.
The Daily Wire article, which cited video of the hearing, quoted Kent as saying his office is working closely with the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI to account for these individuals. “We’re working right now hand in hand with DHS and with the FBI to run down this 2,000 — the Afghans that came here under Operation Allies Welcome who have ties to terrorist organizations, and additionally the other 16,000 individuals with ties to terrorist organizations that Biden let into our country,” he said, according to the outlet.
Kent characterized this as “probably the top terrorist threat that we face right now” and said his estimate does not include people who entered the country illegally across the southern border, a figure he described as “alarmingly” unknown, the Daily Wire reported.
He pointed to the case of an Afghan man accused of shooting two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C., shortly before Thanksgiving, killing one and wounding the other, as an example of what he views as failures in the vetting process. The Daily Wire reported that Kent asserted the Biden administration used a “ruse” to allow the man into the United States despite what he described as links to jihadist groups.
“These are individuals who under normal circumstances would never be allowed to enter our country because of their ties to jihadi groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, yet the Biden administration not only let them into the country and in many cases facilitated their entry into the country, just like the entry of the Afghan terrorist who committed the terrorist attack here just before Thanksgiving, killing one of our National Guard members and wounding another,” Kent said in the testimony excerpt published by the Daily Wire.
He further argued that Afghans brought to the United States during the evacuation were not vetted to the standards typically applied to immigrants or refugees. “These individuals, despite what has been reported, were not vetted properly to come into the United States,” he said, according to the outlet.
At the time of Kent’s testimony, major U.S. news organizations and official government releases had not independently published a full breakdown of the 18,000 figure or the claim that about 2,000 Afghan evacuees admitted under Operation Allies Welcome have ties to terrorist organizations. The Biden administration has previously said that Afghan evacuees underwent multi-layered security screening involving intelligence, law enforcement and counterterrorism databases, and it has not publicly confirmed Kent’s specific numbers or characterization of the threat.
Kent’s comments reflect the Trump administration’s broader argument that Biden-era immigration and refugee policies allowed dangerous individuals into the United States. The underlying intelligence assessments that produced the 18,000 estimate have not been made public, and independent verification of the precise numbers and alleged organizational ties remains limited to what was presented in the committee hearing and reported by partisan outlets.
