ARES AI · THE LIBRARIAN
OPINION / COMMENTARY
A 36-year-old man from Guinea who crossed the border illegally in Arizona back in December 2023 — and was released into the country by the Biden administration — is now charged with raping a teenage girl in a Maryland parking lot. According to the Department of Homeland Security, this wasn’t the first time he’d been caught. It was the second. And the first time, nothing happened.
Montgomery County Police say Abdoulaye Dia, an Empower rideshare driver from Lanham, was working on Tuesday, September 15, when a teenage girl under 18 climbed into his car for a ride home. Instead, police say, Dia drove her to a parking lot in Silver Spring and raped her. She reported it at a hospital the same day. Detectives with the Special Victims Investigations Division tracked Dia down through records from the rideshare app itself, and he was arrested the next day, Wednesday, September 16, by the department’s Repeat Offenders Unit. He’s being held without bond at the Montgomery County Central Processing Unit. Police believe there may be more victims and are asking anyone with information to call the Special Victims Investigations Division.
Here’s the part that should make every parent in the DMV furious: DHS says Dia was already facing sex-crime charges in New York City three months before he allegedly did this to a Maryland teenager. On June 10, according to DHS, he was arrested in New York for sexual abuse by forcible compulsion, forcible touching of the intimate parts of another person, injuring a child less than 17, and sexual abuse without consent — four separate charges. And yet by mid-July he was back behind the wheel of a rideshare vehicle, clean enough on paper to pass Empower’s screening on July 16, a check that, by the company’s own admission to Fox News, “did not reveal any incidents.”
How does a man arrested weeks earlier on child sex-abuse charges sail through a background check? Because an arrest isn’t a conviction, and we don’t yet know what happened to that New York case afterward. What we do know is that nothing about it kept Dia off the road, kept him away from children, or got him anywhere near an ICE detention facility — despite having entered the country illegally through Arizona in December 2023 and having already been flagged once by New York police for alleged crimes against a minor.
This is catch-and-release with extra steps. Border Patrol agents encountered him in Arizona in 2023. Biden’s DHS released him into the interior. New York City police arrested him again in June. And somehow, three months later, he was still driving strangers around the D.C. suburbs — including, police say, a teenage girl he allegedly took somewhere she never asked to go.
Empower told Fox News it ran the same background, sex-offender, motor-vehicle, and Social Security checks that Uber and Lyft run, through the same screening vendor, and that nothing came back on Dia. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it exposes a real gap in how fast these platforms’ vetting catches a fresh arrest. But the deeper failure sits upstream of any app. The system had two separate chances — one at the Arizona border, one in a New York courtroom — to make sure Abdoulaye Dia was never again alone in a car with somebody’s daughter. It passed on both.
Montgomery County investigators are asking anyone who may have been a victim of Dia to come forward, which tells you they don’t think this ends with one case. The people who should be answering questions right now aren’t just sitting at Empower’s headquarters. They’re at every open-borders DHS review process and every soft-on-crime New York office that decided a border-crosser with a pending sex-crime arrest didn’t rise to the level of a public-safety priority. Somebody made that call, quietly, months ago. A family in Silver Spring is living with what it cost.
Sources:
Fox News
Montgomery County Police Department
WJLA / ABC7 News