The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump

by Andrew G. McCabe

In February 2017, less than a month after he was sworn in as attorney general, Sessions began sending requests for the FBI to analyze our counterterrorism cases through the immigration lens. This was the period when the Trump administration was revising the president’s first executive order on immigration, “Protecting the Nation from Terrorist Attacks by Foreign Nationals,” which had provoked many legal actions and had resulted in a hold on the action by a federal judge. Sessions wanted answers to questions like these: How many counterterrorism cases did we have against immigrants? How many people from outside the country had we arrested? The FBI does not keep those statistics in that form. In the course of an investigation, we may uncover someone’s immigration history. That immigration history may or may not prove to be significant. We do not keep aggregate figures on how many Syrians were arrested this month. And there are so many ways of construing the how-many-immigrants question that we would not know how to answer it. Do you mean how many people arrested? How many people convicted of terrorism offenses? Do you mean people who came here from Syria as immigrants? If yes, at what age? What if they came at age five with their parents? Because those people are not Syrians, they’re Americans—they’ve become citizens by now and spent their whole conscious lives here, but yes, technically they did come here as Syrians, thirty years ago. Any one of those numbers presented with...