AUSTIN, Texas — Law enforcement intercepted 14 illegal immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border who were on the terrorist watchlist, a former top official said, more than the four stops that the Department of Homeland Security had disclosed.
U.S. Border Patrol agents stopped 14 noncitizens who were named on the terror watchlist and tried to sneak into the United States between October 2020 and August 2021, one month short of the entire fiscal year 2021, according to recently retired Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott, who disclosed the number during a panel discussion at a Texas Public Policy Foundation conference in Austin this month and in a follow-up conversation with the Washington Examiner.
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The terror watchlist stops in 2021 are significant because they are higher than in previous years. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, declined to comment or release data on terror watchlist encounters.
Last summer, Scott told agents in a farewell address that the agency was encountering people on the terror watchlist “at a level we have never seen before.”
The 14 people he referenced were identified as known or suspected terrorists, according to the Terrorism Screening Center’s Terrorist Screening Database. The database lists people who have concrete affiliations with terrorist organizations and have carried out or plan to carry out terrorism, as well as people suspected of the same activities. The TSC is comprised of multiple federal agencies, while the terror watchlist is overseen by the FBI.
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The number of terror watchlist arrests by the Border Patrol is not published online, but individual arrests are normally shared through CBP’s news releases on its website. CBP stopped disclosing them in 2021 and did not respond to a request for comment.
House Republicans visiting the border in El Paso, Texas, in March 2021 said border authorities had told them that people on the terror watchlist “are now starting to exploit the southern border” as a result of the Biden administration’s lax immigration policies.
“People they’ve caught in the last few days [in Border Patrol’s El Paso sector] have been under the terror watchlist,” House Homeland Security Committee ranking member John Katko, a former federal prosecutor, said at the time. “Individuals that they have on the watchlist for terrorism are now starting to exploit the southern border.”
A CBP news release issued weeks later stated that two Yemeni men who were caught at the border were on the terror watchlist. CBP deleted the news release shortly after publishing it and said the information “was not properly reviewed” beforehand, a move Republicans said was a failure of transparency by the Biden administration.
In addition to the terror watchlist, the government uses a separated category known as “special interest alien” to identify non-U.S. citizens it deems suspicious but has not determined to be affiliated with terrorist organizations. The DHS described the two as “not synonymous nor interchangeable.”
“Overall, we stop on average 10 individuals on the terrorist watchlist per day from traveling to or entering the United States — and more than 3,700 in Fiscal Year 2017,” the DHS said in a statement issued in 2019. “Most of these individuals are trying to enter the U.S. by air, but we must also be focused on stopping those who try to get in by land.”
The surge of migrants from mostly Central American countries over the past year has prompted Border Patrol to pull approximately half of its 20,000 agents to transport, process, and care for people in custody, meaning fewer agents are in the field to prevent drug smuggling and criminals entering the U.S. Oftentimes, smugglers send over large groups of families and children to divert agents to one area and then run other contraband or people with criminal records across the border where agents are not present.
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Terrorism experts claimed in August that al Qaeda and Islamic State members could try to enter the U.S. illegally by way of the southern border following the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in August 2021. Federal agents patrolling the 2,000-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border are increasingly on alert for foreigners on the terror watchlist, a senior CBP official who spoke on the condition of anonymity told the Washington Examiner.
Any person in Border Patrol custody and flagged by the terror watchlist during background checks would be immediately transferred to and picked up by the FBI, said Scott, a distinguished senior fellow for border security at TPPF in Austin, Texas.
