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Sidi Mohamed Amine El Khalifi came to the United States on June 27, 1999 with his parents on a trip to Orlando, Florida. The baby-faced, brown-eyed Moroccan teenager would overstay his tourist visa and remain here for more than a decade, moving from Kissimmee, Florida to Northern Virginia. He worked at odd jobs and had occasional minor scrapes with the law, including a marijuana charge and traffic infractions.

Khalifi stayed illegally, never applying for citizenship; he flew under the radar of law enforcement and immigration officials until the early days of 2011.

At an apartment in Arlington, Virginia, on Jan. 11, 2011, a confidential informant for the FBI's Counter Terrorism Division reported to his handlers that he watched as El Khalifi, by then, 28 years old, listened as another man said, "The war on terror is a war on Muslims." El Khalifi watched as the man produced an AK-47 rifle, two revolvers and ammunition, and discussed what the group needed to do to be ready to fight back.

Over the next year, FBI agents, detectives from the U.S. Capitol Police, and other investigators from the sprawling Joint Terrorism Task Force that covers the National Capitol Region, kept close tabs on El Khalifi. El Khalifi allegedly kept discussing his desires to launch a terrorist attack. The investigators kept gathering intelligence.

Over the course of the next several months, {it} became to clear to the Joint Terrorism Task Force investigators and their FBI bosses that El Khalifi was determined to move forward.
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El Khalifi's alleged plans ranged from attacking a synagogue, to a restaurant frequented by U.S. generals and admirals, and to a building in downtown Arlington that housed Department of Defense offices.

According to the FBI, he went so far as to have a gun to shoot his way past Capitol police to get into the building so he could detonate himself inside the Capitol building. When Hussien, Yusuf and El Kahlifi had tested a bomb in a quarry on Jan. 15, 2012, El Khalifi allegedly told the men he believed to be his al Qaeda handlers that he wanted more explosives, a bigger bomb -- if not enough to destroy the whole building,at least enough to kill 30 people. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-57380678-503543/inside-the-plan
s-of-capitol-bomb-suspect/ that, I doubt we'll ever know. It APPEARS that they discovered him, watched him, decided he was serious and went after him. Whether they were right or wrong is something I can't judge.

The two things I can say is he didn't just have an "expired visa", he deliberately stayed for many years and was an illegal alien. Nobody approached him until he himself said he wanted to act. He went so far as to test a bomb...THOSE explosives weren't "fake". And according to the article you posted, "the suspect went out on his own to buy component pieces for an improvised explosive device." Beyond that, I don't know enough to judge.