Biden’s Broken Border is a five-part Washington Examiner series highlighting the border security records President Joe Biden has shattered in less than two years in office and the trickle-down effects that the crisis is having on the United States. Part One looked at how Biden already broke the record for migrant apprehensions in 2022. Part Two, below, will examine the dramatic shift in demographics of migrants crossing the border illegally. Part Three will show the consequences of children crossing the border alone in unprecedented numbers. Part Four will look at the record number of migrants dying while attempting to enter the U.S. And Part Five will examine the deadly fentanyl crisis that has rocked communities deep within the country.
Energy-036_WSX012120The number of individuals on the FBI‘s terrorism watch list arrested after attempting to enter the U.S. illegally from Mexico over the past year is beyond any year on record as the number of people migrating from global destinations hits an all-time high.
Federal law enforcement agents at the U.S.-Mexico border arrested 78 terrorism watch list suspects for trying to enter the country unlawfully in the 11-month period ending in August, according to Border Patrol data. With one month left in the government’s fiscal year, the 78 arrests far surpass last year’s record of 15 and the three arrests in 2020.
“So far this year, 78 people whose names appear on the Terrorist Screening Dataset were stopped trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border between ports of entry this fiscal year. The Biden admin is playing games with our national security & it must STOP NOW,” House Homeland Security Republicans wrote in a post on Twitter on Tuesday.
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EXPLAINED: TITLE 42, THE POLICY AT THE CENTER OF THE BORDER DEBATE
The Washington Examiner obtained leaked data from within the Department of Homeland Security that offered a glimpse into the nationalities of individuals flagged for alleged terrorist ties. For the first six months of 2022, 25 of the 27 known or suspected terrorists arrested were citizens of Colombia.
The spike in the number of terrorist-related arrests coincides with a dramatic demographic change in the nationalities of migrants trying to enter the U.S. through the southwest border, with an uptick in citizens from Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.
US Border Released on ParoleCustoms and Border Protection data going back to 2007 show that Mexicans made up 90% of all arrests that year. By 2019, migrants from the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras made up more than 70% of all arrests. Now, migrants from countries outside of Mexico and the Northern Triangle make up 1.1 million of the total 3.4 million apprehensions, or 32%, according to CBP data.
The shift brings challenges for national security, as well as diplomatic headaches, as the U.S. cannot easily deport citizens to nations with hostile governments. Countries must be willing to accept repatriated citizens. Mexico and most Central American nations have good diplomatic relations with the U.S. and allow citizens to be flown back, serving to an extent as a deterrent. The opposite is the case for people fleeing countries to which they can’t be returned.
DemographicShiftBorderCrossers.jpgAaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director for the American Immigration Council in Washington, said authoritarian regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela refuse to engage with the U.S. and, as a result, will not take back their citizens.
“More Cubans have come to the U.S.-Mexico border in this fiscal year than came during the entire Mariel boatlift,” said Reichlin-Melnick, referring to the 125,000 Cubans who boarded boats in the island’s Mariel Harbor in 1980 and departed for the U.S. “You can’t deport somebody to a country that refuses to take them.”
More than 177,000 Cubans have attempted to enter the U.S. illegally in the first 10 months of 2022, compared to 14,000 in 2020, according to CBP data. Nicaraguans have jumped in that time from 3,000 to 134,000 and Venezuelans from 4,000 to 130,000. Those unable to be returned are released into the U.S.
Alain Rios, Katia MadenThe 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 (FARC-EP).
Immigration analyst Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute in Washington noted that some Colombians on the watch list may not be true terror threats.
“It’s … possible that the individual Colombians apprehended were affiliated with FARC or the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia, which have since been delisted as Foreign Terrorist Organizations by the State Department, but their individual names are still in the TSDS and haven’t been purged,” Nowrasteh said.
Immigration Tale Of Two BordersFBI 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 migrants surrendering prevents them from apprehending others who do not want to get caught.
CBP declined to provide any additional information about the 66 on the terrorism watch list. However, the sheer number has raised concern as to who might be slipping through the cracks at the border.
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“Who’s in the gaggle of 700,000-plus Southwest border got-aways, which is larger than the population of Boston? No idea,” Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge and legal fellow at the conservative Center for Immigration Studies, wrote in a June blog post. “We won’t know who the worst ones are until they act. But the worst ones are plainly coming.”
This story has been updated to reflect new terrorist database data published by the federal government late Monday.
