Among the multitudes stopped at the southern border of the United States last month, there were sixteen people on the FBI’s terror watch list. They came across the border with a record-breaking number of migrants illegally entering the country.
According to Fox News, those numbers last month raised the total amount of such encounters at the southern border this year to 69. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents expect to see the number continue to increase and shatter last fiscal year’s 98 encounters.
CBP Office of Field Operations authorities reported that the agency had encountered upwards of 214 people on the Terrorist Screening Database along both the southern and northern border ports of entry this year. In 2022, authorities apprehended 380 such individuals.
Between 2017 and 2020, the news outlet reported that authorities apprehended just eight terror watch-list members between ports of entry. And in 2021, agents encountered 15 individuals named on the FBI’s list.
The rise in those on the terror watch-list arrests at the border goes hand in hand with a surge of as many as 4.9 million migrants who have crossed into the United States under Joe Biden’s presidency. This is according to data from the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
The New York Post reported that CBP authorities caught 128,877 people who crossed the border illegally in January and another 128,913 in February. The agency has used new measures that were recently implemented so that accounts for the slight drop in encounters.
“The new border enforcement measures kept February’s overall encounter numbers nearly even with January,” said CBP Acting Commissioner Troy Miller.
“Despite inheriting a dismantled immigration system and facing unprecedented migration that is affecting nations throughout the Western Hemisphere, this administration has surged resources to the border, reducing the number of encounters between ports of entry, disrupting more smuggling operations than ever before, and interdicting more drugs in the last two years than had been stopped in the five years prior,” a spokesperson told Fox News.
GOP officials argue the president’s policies are the primary cause of the border crisis.
