On this day 25 years ago, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef and six other individuals carried out the first successful terrorist attack on the World Trade Center \u2013 an act which killed six people and wounded more than a thousand.<\/p>\n
Just after noon of Feb. 26, a bomb ripped through the underground garage of the World Trade Center taking the lives of John DiGiovanni, Robert Kirkpatrick, Stephen A. Knapp, William Macko, Wilfredo Mercado, and Monica Rodriguez Smith.<\/p>\n
The bombing showed the plotters failed to achieve their goal of bringing down the Towers, but the \u201cgreatest terrorist attack on U.S. soil\u201d had exposed failures in the nation\u2019s immigration system.<\/p>\n
The mastermind of the 1993 bombing was Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, an individual who boarded a plane in Pakistan on a false British passport before traveling to the U.S. on a fake Iraqi passport and entered the United States in September 1992 without a visa.<\/p>\n
He was permitted to enter provisionally after asking for asylum, and but was not detained for further review because of lack of detention space.<\/p>\n
Yousef came to the U.S. on the same plane as Ahmed Ajaj, a Palestinian who arrived on a fake Swedish passport, was found to have bomb making videos and manuals in his luggage and was arrested on a passport fraud charge.<\/p>\n
Congress convened hearings to determine how the terrorists were able to enter the country without raising red flags and promised to reform the legal immigration system. Less than a decade later, the terrorists achieved their goal and more than 3,000 people perished at their hands.<\/p>\n
The exploitation and violation of U.S. immigration laws by terrorists is not isolated to the World Trade Center attacks.<\/p>\n
Even after two of the worst terror attacks on U.S. soil, the legal loopholes remain. Last fall, it was reported<\/a> that Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, who drove into a crowd of bicyclists and pedestrians near the World Trade Center, had gained access to American shores via the diversity visa lottery.<\/p>\n