Americans are well aware of the security disaster of the Biden-Harris open southern border — including 400 illegal crossers who were flagged on the FBI terrorism watch list.
But an alarming new terrorism prosecution in New York now demands American attention and diplomatic pressure be turned on Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s unprecedented mass immigration policies.
Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, a 20-year-old Pakistani citizen legally allowed a Canadian student visa in June 2023, stands accused in US federal court of plotting a mass shooting of Jews in New York City, to celebrate the October 7 anniversary of the Hamas massacre in Israel.
Khan hoped it would go down in history as “the largest US attack since 9/11.”
“We are going to nyc to slaughter them” with AR-style rifles and hunting knives “so we can slit their throats,” Khan told an undercover FBI agent he believed was a co-conspirator, according to an agent complaint.
“Even if we don’t attack an event, we could rack up easily a lot of Jews.”
Khan was among the record-breaking 400,000 issued foreign student vises by Canada in 2023 — on top of the 1.5 million foreign national workers the Trudeau government brought in as a new labor force since 2021.
In a joint undercover sting operation with the FBI, Canadian authorities on September 4 arrested Khan just 12 miles from the US border on his way to meet a smuggler with a pocketful of cash and a plan to attack Jewish Chabad centers in Brooklyn.
Just a few months after arriving for school in Canada, Khan began plotting his US attack on the “zionist Jews” for a “one of a kind attack on US soil” in an unnamed city, timed for the upcoming Yom Kippur high holy day services — “indoors in a confined space” and to know exit door locations “so we can trap them and kill them inside.”
It was to be a suicide attack using semi-automatic rifles and knives “to sacrifice oursel[ves] so that the . . . muslimeen can wakeup and support the State [i.e., the Islamic State, or ISIS],” court records show.
For his border-crossing murder spree plan, Khan went online to the wrong jihadist chat groups to form a “real off-line cell” of six conspirators who could be split into three teams for simultaneous attacks for “maximizing casualty count” but who — fortuitously — turned out to be undercover FBI chat room lurkers.
At first, Khan planned to hire someone to smuggle him southward over the US-Canadian border to attack an unnamed “City 1.”
“If we[’]re successful this is going to be one of the largest attacks ever on jews outside of the israeli territory in recent times,” he told the undercover FBI agent, and “that too in America would be big and a good propaganda victory for the islamic state . . .”
In the end, Khan settled on Chabad organizations in New York City for his killing spree because “the “population of jews in new York city is 1 million” with “tons of Jews walking around the neighborhood[,] hundreds of synagogues” and “[very] unprotected . . . perfect to target jews.”
An extradition proceeding is planned to bring Khan from detention in Quebec to stand trial in New York.
The Khan case is a blaring wake-up siren for how lax Canada’s immigration policies have been, and the security threat from our northern border.
Beginning in 2021, Canada’s progressive liberal government in 2021 embarked on a program to import a new foreign national workforce in the hundreds of thousands per year from all over the world.
The numbers caught making illegal northern border crossings into the US coincides with that effort.
So far this year, US Border Patrol’s illegal entry apprehensions of foreign nationals from 21 countries have doubled from 2023, to more than 20,000 in 2024.
That is still a tiny fraction of southern border crossings but enough of an increase that US Border Patrol has had to redeploy forces north.
Khan’s plan is only the latest in a series of six Canadian terror plots police have foiled just since October 7, some of which involved recent immigrants the Trudeau government brought in and vetting failures.
Even though the other plots happened in Canada, they still place the United States in harm’s way and justify a new and robust US diplomatic pressure campaign to force change on both sides.
One typically egregious example occurred in July when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested 62-year-old Egyptian Mostafa Eldidi and his 26-year-old son Mostafa Eldidi for an alleged advanced-stage plot to carry out a “violent, serious attack” in Toronto.
The elder Eldidi arrived in Canada in 2018 and received citizenship in May 2024, under lenient Trudeau government policies, despite being flagged as a security threat. There was evidence that he assaulted a prisoner for ISIS in a third country during 2015, an incident ISIS filmed and posted on its social media accounts.
The younger Eldidi apparently studied for a time at Iowa Wesleyan University in the United States on an approved student visa after Canada denied his student visa application in 2019, then a year later crossed the Canadian land border and asked for asylum, which was approved under the lenient Trudeau policies.
The Trudeau government is already facing a backlash from Canadian conservatives for the vetting failures. But the government’s reaction has been tepid; in the wake of the US border-crossing plot involving an immigrant student, the Trudeau government says it will reduce those visas from 400,000 to a still-record-breaking 360,000 next year.
American politicians are starting to worry.
In May, the Trudeau government announcement that it would increase the number of Gazans who will be allowed into his country prompted Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and five other Republican senators to send a letter of objection requesting “heightened scrutiny by the US Department of Homeland Security should any of them attempt to enter the United States at ports of entry as well as between ports of entry.”
Democrats should join them in the effort.
The first order of business should be the use of economic leverage to force Canada to reduce the numbers very substantially and enhance its security screenings. The safety of both countries depends on it.
Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, is the author of “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.”
