Forty-two people on the U.S. government’s terror watch list have been arrested attempting to enter the United States illegally since President Joe Biden took office, according to federal data obtained by the Washington Examiner.
The 42 arrests happened across the country, not just on the southern border, and include people who tried to enter the U.S. by illegally crossing the border, as opposed to coming through a port of entry.
“Since January 20, 2021, the U.S. Border Patrol and the Office of Field Operations has arrested 42 subjects who were on the terror watchlist and attempted to enter the United States illegally,” the DHS wrote in response to a recent congressional inquiry. “These numbers are inclusive of anyone who may be on the No-Fly List.”
Twenty-three of the 42 arrests were made between Jan. 20, 2021, and Dec. 27, 2021, specifically between ports of entry at the southern border, according to a report from Fox News that only examined Border Patrol arrests. The other 19 arrests happened when people being inspected at the border crossings were flagged.
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The 42 arrests do not include those who are on the terror watch list but evaded law enforcement at the border and made it into the country without being detected. Large numbers of migrants successfully elude authorities — the Border Patrol is aware of instances in March in which 62,000 noncitizens were observed illegally entering the country, but agents were unable to apprehend them.
Last summer, recently retired Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott told agents in his farewell address that the agency was encountering people on the terror watch list “at a level we have never seen before.”
Noncitizens who are apprehended for illegal entry at the border and at land ports of entry are screened against 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 center comprises multiple federal agencies, while the terror watch list is overseen by the FBI.
The number of terror watch list arrests by the Border Patrol is not published online, but individual arrests are normally shared through the CBP’s news releases on its website. The CBP stopped disclosing them in 2021 after publishing two reports that resulted in four arrests.
House Republicans visiting the border in El Paso, Texas, in March 2021 said border authorities had told them that people on the terror watch list “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 watch list,” House Homeland Security Committee ranking member John Katko, a former federal prosecutor, said at the time. “Individuals that they have on the watch list 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 watch list. The 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 watch list, the government uses a separate 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, mostly from Central American countries, over the past year has prompted the Border Patrol to pull approximately half of its southern border-based 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.
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.
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Any person in Border Patrol custody and flagged by the terror watch list during background checks would be immediately transferred to and picked up by the FBI, said Scott, a distinguished senior fellow for border security at the Texas Public Policy Foundation in Austin, Texas.
