Nearly 100 noncitizens on the FBI’s terror watchlist were arrested attempting to sneak into the United States from Mexico over the past year, setting a new record and prompting security concerns among Republicans, according to newly released government data.
Border Patrol agents determined that 98 of the 2.3 million people apprehended while attempting to cross the southern border illegally in fiscal 2022 were suspected terrorists or closely affiliated with terrorist organizations
The 98 figure is a major spike from 0 in 2019, when the U.S. border faced a smaller-scale humanitarian and national security crisis.
“Our adversaries know they can enter our country through our failed border,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), the top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, in a statement Monday.
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Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), the top Republican on the Senate homeland security appropriations subcommittee, said the Border Patrol was “overrun” and the “consequences of these lax enforcement actions should concern every single American.”
Terror watchlist arrests have jumped dramatically over the past six months. As of March 30, halfway into fiscal 2022, just 27 people on the watchlist had been arrested on the border. Of the 27 arrests, 25 were citizens of Colombia.
The Terrorist Screening Dataset is the government database that lists people believed to be or definitively involved with terrorist groups, as well as people affiliated with known or suspected terrorists. The State Department lists two Colombian groups as foreign terrorist organizations: the Segunda Marquetalia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — People’s Army, or FARC-EP.
The spike in the number of terrorist-related arrests coincides with a dramatic demographic change in the nationalities of immigrants trying to enter the U.S. through the southwest border, with an uptick in citizens from Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.
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FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the Senate in August that although there was no “imminent threat from a foreign terrorist organization on the border at the moment,” terrorists are looking for any vulnerability to “exploit.” Border Patrol agents being pulled from the field to process and transport the immigrants surrendering prevents them from apprehending others who do not want to get caught.
