An illegal immigrant from Guinea who entered the country through Arizona 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.
Montgomery County police arrested Abdoulaye Dia on Wednesday after an underage teenage girl reported to officers at a local hospital that her Empower rideshare driver had taken her to a parking lot in Silver Spring, Maryland, and sexually assaulted her. Police had responded to the hospital on Tuesday, and investigators identified Dia through information from the rideshare app, Fox News Digital reported.
Dia faces four charges: first-degree rape, kidnapping, second-degree assault, and third-degree sex offense. But the Maryland case is not the first time he has been accused of sexual violence. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson disclosed that Dia was arrested on June 10 in New York City on charges of sexual abuse by forcible compulsion, forcible touching, injuring a child under 17, and sexual abuse without consent.
The dispositions of those New York charges remain unclear. What is clear is that Dia was driving for a rideshare company and had access to passengers, including minors, after those arrests.
DHS stated that Dia, a Guinea national from West Africa, entered the United States illegally through Arizona in December 2023. He was released by the Biden administration. The department did not specify under what authority or program Dia was let go.
That release put Dia into the interior of the country, where he eventually obtained work as a rideshare driver for Empower, a company that says it runs the same screening as its larger competitors. How an illegal immigrant with no lawful status secured that position is among the unanswered questions in this case.
A federal appeals court has ruled that illegal immigrants have no constitutional right to remain free during deportation proceedings, yet cases like Dia's show that release-and-forget policies have real consequences for the communities left to absorb the risk.
Empower, the rideshare platform that employed Dia, said it ran a battery of checks before allowing him to drive. The company's statement laid out the scope in detail:
"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 added that its drivers "are vetted against the same global watchlist used by Uber and Lyft through the same screening provider." The company also said it cooperated with Montgomery County police after the department reached out about the incident.
"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."
The fact that five separate checks, including a sex offender registry search, turned up nothing on a man who had already been arrested in New York City for alleged sex crimes raises pointed questions about what these screening systems actually catch. The New York Post reported the same details about the background check failure, noting the case feeds a broader national conversation about whether rideshare vetting is adequate to protect passengers.
Empower's statement notably referred to Dia as "this customer" rather than "this driver", an odd choice of language for a company describing someone who allegedly used its platform to access a victim.
The timeline DHS laid out is damning in its simplicity. Dia crossed the border illegally in December 2023. He was released. By June 10, he had been arrested in New York City on four charges tied to alleged sexual violence, including injuring a child under 17. Weeks later, on July 16, Empower ran its checks and found nothing. Then came the alleged rape of an underage girl in Silver Spring.
Each step in that sequence represents a point where the system could have intervened and did not. The Biden administration released him at the border. New York's criminal justice system apparently did not hold him or flag him in a way that showed up on a national screening. And a rideshare company cleared him to drive passengers alone.
Cases like this are not abstractions. When governors like Ron DeSantis have confronted sex crimes involving public officials, they have acted swiftly, DeSantis suspended a political ally on child sex charges and pointed to Florida's death penalty law for such offenses. The contrast with jurisdictions that release accused sex offenders back into communities without meaningful tracking is stark.
Meanwhile, in Minnesota, Governor Tim Walz and the state's Board of Pardons cleared a convicted child sex offender facing deportation, a decision that drew fierce criticism from those who argue that political leaders are actively shielding dangerous individuals from the consequences of their crimes.
DHS has not disclosed whether an ICE detainer has been filed against Dia in connection with the Maryland arrest. The outcome of his prior New York City charges, whether they were dropped, reduced, or are still pending, is unknown. So is the specific program or authority under which the Biden administration released him after his illegal border crossing.
The victim's age has not been made public beyond the description "underage teenage female." No docket or case number for the Maryland prosecution has been released. And no one has explained how Dia obtained the credentials needed to work as a rideshare driver while in the country illegally.
Every one of those gaps matters. If Dia's New York charges were dismissed or never prosecuted, it would explain why Empower's screening came back clean, and it would indict the system that let a man accused of sexually abusing a child walk free without a record that followed him. If the charges were still pending, the failure belongs to whatever database or reporting mechanism is supposed to flag active defendants for employers running background checks.
Either way, an underage girl in Maryland paid the price for a chain of institutional failures that stretches from the Arizona border to New York City to a parking lot in Silver Spring. The people who built and defended that chain owe the public an answer for every broken link.