Nearly 70 non-US citizens on the FBI’s terror watch list have been caught trying to illegally cross the country’s southern border since October — a disturbing trend that appears set to easily beat last year’s alarming figure.
There were 16 such people listed in the Terrorist Screening Database who were encountered attempting to illegally enter the US from Mexico last month alone, according to new data released by Customs and Border Protection.
The total number of the illegals who were on the terror watch list and stopped at the southern border since Oct. 1, the start of the CBP’s fiscal year 2023, is now at 69, authorities said.
Compare that figure to the same one for all of the agency’s last fiscal year — or 98 non-US citizens on the watch list who were halted — and it appears there will easily be even more caught this fiscal year.
Another non-US citizen also was caught trying to cross the country’s northern border since October, according to the CBP’s Office of Field Operations.
During CBP’s 2021 fiscal year, there were a total of just 15 such apprehensions at the US southern border.
In the agency’s fiscal year 2020, that same number was three — and zero the year before.
The Biden administration has presided over a record surge in overall illegal immigration — with a nearly 2.4 million illegal southern-border-crossing arrests in the CBP’s fiscal year 2022.
Fiscal year 2023 is set to outpace that record, with more than 762,000 such border apprehensions already recorded by CBP between October and January.
By comparison, the CPB’s fiscal year 2021 saw 1.7 million people caught illegally crossing the US’s southern border. In 2020, that figure was 500,000 and nearly 1 million in 2019.
Migrants on the terror watch list who have been caught are only a small fraction of the overall number of illegals stopped at the US border, authorities noted.
Republicans have repeatedly demanded that President Biden better secure the border.
For the past two months, the number of people caught illegally crossing the country’s southern border has been steady — and astronomical.
In January, there were 128,877 people who crossed the border illegally, and in February, there were 128,913 total.
“The new border enforcement measures kept February’s overall encounter numbers nearly even with January,” said CBP Acting Commissioner Troy Miller in a statement.
According to Miller, CBP has launched a new app to allow migrants the ability to schedule an appointment at a port of entry to request a humanitarian exception to the Title 42 public health order.
“The app cuts out the smugglers and decreases migrant exploitation,” Miller said. “CBP continues to make improvements to the app to address feedback we have received from stakeholders.”
