Abdullah Dia picked up a teenager through the Empower rideshare app in Montgomery County, Maryland. He drove to a parking lot. What authorities say happened next got him charged with first-degree rape, kidnapping, second-degree assault, and third-degree sex offense.
Dia is an illegal immigrant from Guinea. He was apprehended at the Arizona border in 2023 and released into the country under the Biden administration.
That sequence deserves to sit with you for a second. Border Patrol had him. They physically had him. And someone, somewhere in the Biden administration, processed the paperwork that put him back on American streets — where he eventually ended up behind the wheel of a rideshare car, and gave him the ability to prey on unsuspecting teen girls who were just trying to get from one place to another.
The charges aren't ambiguous. First-degree rape. Kidnapping. These aren't misdemeanor immigration violations or paperwork disputes. A teenage girl was allegedly assaulted in a parking lot by a man this country had every legal and moral reason to remove three years ago.
Dia had been working as a driver on the Empower platform, a rideshare app that connects riders with independent drivers. How he passed whatever screening process Empower uses — if one exists — while carrying the immigration status of a man caught illegally crossing the border is a question someone at that company should be answering right now.
Authorities believe there may be additional victims.
That line, buried near the bottom of the reporting, is the one that should be leading every newscast in the country. Law enforcement isn't speculating for dramatic effect. When investigators publicly state they believe there are more victims, it means the evidence pattern suggests this wasn't a one-time event. It means other people may have gotten into that car.
The catch-and-release machinery that produced this outcome wasn't a glitch. It was policy. The Biden administration made a deliberate choice to release border-crossers into the interior rather than detain or deport them. That choice had consequences measured in human suffering — not in the abstract policy-paper sense, but in the specific sense of a teenager in a parking lot in Montgomery County.
Montgomery County, for context, is one of the wealthiest counties in America, just outside Washington, D.C. It's the kind of place where the people who design immigration policy send their own kids to school. The irony isn't lost.
Every one of these cases follows the same mechanical sequence. An illegal crossing. An apprehension that should have ended in removal. A release. A period of invisibility inside the country. Then a crime that didn't have to happen against a victim who didn't have to exist. The system produces these outcomes the way an assembly line produces parts — predictably, repeatedly, and with nobody's name on the final product.
Dia is now facing the full weight of Maryland's criminal justice system. The charges carry decades of potential prison time. None of that helps a teenage girl in Montgomery County.
The border was the last clean chance to prevent this. They had him in 2023, in Arizona, and they let him go.