A federal judge dismissed the high-profile cases of two Jordanian men previously charged with unlawfully entering Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, in May.
U.S. attorneys for the Eastern District of Virginia filed a motion Oct. 3 to dismiss the misdemeanor charges against Hasan Hamdan and Mohammad Dabous — two men who allegedly ignored orders from Quantico gate sentries before attempting to enter the base while driving a box truck. The pair were stopped by vehicle denial barriers and turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The incident gained national attention from Congress and state leaders. Fox News and Potomac Local News — which first reported the breach — said that at least one of the men crossed the U.S. southern border in April before being released on notice to later appear in court. The other man was in the U.S. on an expired student visa, the outlets reported.
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U.S. Magistrate Judge William Porter dismissed the cases “without prejudice” the same day the motion was filed by prosecutors on Oct. 3. Court documents did not explain the motive for the motion other than stating “because the ends of justice are best served by this dismissal.”
When contacted by Military.com on Friday, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia declined to comment on why the cases were recommended for dismissal. The publication could not reach listed attorneys for the two men that afternoon.
Multiple media outlets reported that the two men approached the gate on Fuller Road leading into the base with a box truck, claiming to be Amazon subcontractors seeking to make a delivery to a post office in the town of Quantico.
With no valid authorization to enter post, gate personnel directed the box truck to a holding area for vetting. The pair allegedly ignored the orders and accelerated onto the base before striking a hydraulic barricade deployed by the gate personnel.
Potomac Local was also first to report the case dismissals earlier this week.
Marine Corps Base Quantico — more than 30 miles away from Washington, D.C. — is home to several Marine Corps schools and commands, including the Combat Development Command. It also houses FBI and other federal agency facilities.
The attempted breach raised alarms in Congress and at the state level. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin wrote a letter to President Joe Biden a few weeks after the Jordanians were detained demanding transparency from the federal government on the case.
“The federal government has not provided adequate information to Virginia on these matters, and the publicly available facts are disturbing,” Youngkin wrote in the letter. He also appeared on Fox News and said “Joe Biden has brought the border crisis literally to the front gate of Quantico Marine Corps Base.”
That same month, more than a dozen GOP senators penned a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas requesting a brief and answered questions about the “deeply concerning incident.”
The attempted breach followed a string of unlawful gate entries, some by foreign nationals. A month before the Quantico incident, authorities detained a Chinese national attempting to access Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms in California. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that the Pentagon and FBI tracked as many as 100 instances of Chinese nationals attempting to access bases.
In September 2023, military police shot at a vehicle that had attempted to enter Twentynine Palms. Another vehicle caught fire after a driver attempted to unlawfully enter Camp Pendleton, California — another Marine Corps base on the West Coast.
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