A Guinea national who entered the country illegally in 2023 and was released by the Biden administration now faces first-degree rape and kidnapping charges in Maryland, after a prior sex abuse arrest in New York City failed to stop him from driving for a rideshare company.
Montgomery County police arrested Abdoulaye Dia on Wednesday after an underage teenage girl reported to a hospital that she had been raped by her Empower rideshare driver. Investigators identified Dia through information from the rideshare app, and the Department of Homeland Security disclosed that the charges were not his first brush with law enforcement over alleged sexual violence.
Dia faces four counts in Maryland: first-degree rape, kidnapping, second-degree assault, and third-degree sex offense. The teen told police Dia drove her to a parking lot in Silver Spring, a suburb just north of Washington, D.C., where the alleged assault took place. DHS confirmed that Dia had crossed into the United States illegally through Arizona in December 2023 and was released into the interior by the Biden administration, a release whose specific legal mechanism has not been publicly detailed.
Before the Maryland charges, Dia had already been arrested on June 10 in New York City. The charges there, as Fox News Digital reported, included sexual abuse by forcible compulsion, forcible touching of the sexual or intimate parts of another person, injuring a child under 17, and sexual abuse without consent. DHS disclosed those charges, but the current status of the New York case, whether it was dismissed, is still pending, or resulted in any conviction, remains unclear.
That gap matters. If the New York arrest led to no detention, no deportation proceeding, and no flag in the background-check systems that rideshare companies rely on, then every layer of the system designed to keep a repeat offender off the road failed in sequence.
The broader question of how illegal immigrants with active criminal cases move freely between jurisdictions is not academic. ICE recently arrested more than 1,300 illegal immigrants in a two-week sweep across the D.C. suburbs, the same region where Dia was operating as a rideshare driver.
Empower, the rideshare company that employed Dia, told Fox News Digital that it ran a battery of checks on him. The company said it conducted a background check, sex offender check, driving record check, social security trace, and global watchlist search on July 16, 2026. Every check came back clean.
"The background check, sex offender check, driving record check, social security trace, and global watchlist search on this customer were conducted on July 16, 2026, and did not reveal any incidents."
Empower's statement raises an immediate question: How did a man who had already been arrested in New York City on multiple sex-related charges clear a sex offender check and a background screen? The answer likely lies in the difference between an arrest and a conviction, and in the patchwork of databases that screening companies query. If the New York charges were still pending, or if they were processed under a system that did not feed into the commercial databases Empower uses, the check would return nothing.
Empower also referred to Dia as "this customer" rather than "this driver" in its statement, an odd choice of terminology that the company did not explain.
The company said it cooperated fully with investigators once Montgomery County police reached out.
"The Montgomery County Police Department reached out to Empower about this incident. Empower, as is our policy, asked law enforcement what Empower could do to assist their investigation and immediately provided all information requested."
Cooperation after the fact is the bare minimum. The harder question is whether a rideshare platform operating in a market flooded with illegal immigrants who lack verifiable identity documents can run meaningful background checks at all. A social security trace is only as good as the number it traces. A global watchlist search is only as good as the data foreign governments share. For someone who entered the country illegally and was released without a thorough vetting process, these checks may amount to searching an empty room.
DHS confirmed that Dia crossed into the United States illegally through Arizona in December 2023. The Biden administration released him, though under what authority or program remains unstated. Whether he was paroled, given a notice to appear before an immigration judge, or processed through some other mechanism is not part of the public record as disclosed so far.
What is part of the record: within roughly 18 months of his release, Dia had been arrested in New York City on four sex-related charges. And after that arrest, he was driving passengers, including minors, for a rideshare company in Maryland.
The case fits a pattern that has drawn increasing scrutiny from federal enforcement officials. ICE leadership has warned of expanded operations targeting jurisdictions where sanctuary policies limit cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities. Whether Dia's New York arrest triggered any communication with ICE, or whether sanctuary policies in New York City prevented it, is among the open questions DHS has not yet answered publicly.
No information has been released about whether an ICE detainer has been lodged against Dia following his Maryland arrest, or whether he is currently in local custody, federal custody, or both.
Dia now faces four serious felony charges in Montgomery County. First-degree rape in Maryland carries a potential life sentence. Kidnapping carries up to 30 years. The second-degree assault and third-degree sex offense charges add additional exposure.
The underage victim, whose name and specific age have not been released, went to a hospital to report the assault. That is where Montgomery County police first learned of the case on Tuesday. By Wednesday, Dia was in custody. The speed of the arrest suggests investigators had little trouble identifying him through the rideshare app's records, and Empower confirmed it turned over all requested information.
The political fault lines around cases like this are well established. Democrats have spent years resisting tougher interior enforcement, opposing cooperation between local police and ICE, and defending release policies at the border. Internal fractures within the Democratic Party have grown as some members break with leadership on immigration, but the policy architecture that released Dia into the country in December 2023 was built by the same leadership that resisted every attempt to tighten it.
The timeline tells the story plainly. December 2023: illegal entry, release. June 10: arrested in New York on sex charges. July 16, 2026: background check clears him to drive passengers. Days later: an underage girl reports a rape in a Silver Spring parking lot.
Every institution that touched this case, border processing, the New York criminal justice system, the background-check industry, the rideshare platform, had a chance to stop what happened next. None of them did.
When the government releases people it cannot identify, cannot track, and cannot vet into communities that cannot screen them, the consequences land on the most vulnerable. In this case, a teenage girl riding in a car she had every reason to believe was safe.
