Alex Nowrasteh
Mohamed Bailor Jalloh murdered one person and injured two others in a terrorist attack on March 11 at Old Dominion University in Virginia. I immediately knew that Jalloh’s attack was motivated by Islamism because I knew of him from my earlier research on foreign-born terrorism. I listed Jalloh in my 2025 policy analysis on foreign-born terrorism as convicted of planning an attack in 2016 (see appendix), which he did as a naturalized immigrant from Sierra Leone. He was released from jail and then committed his recent attack in Virginia.
Jalloh’s dastardly attack is one of five deadly foreign-born terrorist attacks during the second Trump administration that have killed a total of eight people. Six of them were victims of foreign-born terrorists motivated by Islamism and two by a right-wing terrorist who killed his parents to steal money to pursue his plot to assassinate President Trump to start a white supremacist ethnostate. In comparison, a single foreign-born terrorist killed one person during the Biden administration, and he was motivated by Chinese nationalism.
Figure 1 shows the number of victims of foreign-born terrorism. It’s easy for the number of victims to vary so much over just a few years when there are so few. The number of victims of foreign-born terrorism in 2025 was the highest since 2017, when Trump was also in office, but just 0.03 percent of homicides last year were committed by foreign-born terrorists in attacks.
The annual chance of being murdered in a foreign-born terrorist attack during the second Trump administration is about one in 85 million per year, about 16 times higher than during the Biden administration so far, which was about one in 1.3 billion per year. Regardless, it’s a tiny risk, even though fewer people were murdered in foreign-born terror attacks during Biden’s presidency than any other president since Gerald Ford and likely even earlier.
Over 85 percent of all people killed by terrorists in attacks on US soil were killed by foreign-born terrorists since 1975. The 9/11 attacks account for 83 percent of those victims because they were the deadliest terrorist attacks in world history by a factor of nine.[i] Things have changed since 9/11, which occurred smack dab in the middle of my dataset.
[i] If you count the 10/7 attack in Israel as a terrorist attack, then 9/11 was two-and-a-half times deadlier than the next deadliest attack, but some don’t count Hamas’ attack because Hamas was the government of Gaza and therefore their attack is not terrorism by definition. Brutal, regardless of how you classify it, but plausibly not terrorism.
