Thousands of illegal immigrants from "special interest" countries that have ties to terrorist groups have been arrested at the southern border under President Joe Biden, proof that the terrorists themselves have made it into the United States, according to a Senate Republican.
“It only took 19 Al Qaeda operatives to kill nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001," said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), ranking member for the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Criminal Justice and Counterterrorism, in a statement to the Washington Examiner on Tuesday. "Many, many times that number of known terrorists have surely crossed our southern border since Joe Biden took office. His open border is the gravest terrorist threat to the U.S. homeland.”
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Concern over the threat of terrorism has grown since this weekend's terrorist attack in Israel by Hamas militants who killed more than 1,000 Israelis, as well as raped, tortured, and beheaded women and infants during the hourslong attack. Along with the deaths in Gaza, the toll is at least 1,800 lives lost, including 11 Americans.
Since the start of fiscal 2023 last October through August, Border Patrol agents on the U.S.-Mexico boundary have caught 151 non-U.S. citizens who, after being processed, were determined to be on the FBI's terror watch list for being a terrorist or affiliated with someone who was.
The 151 figure is the highest annual number in the Border Patrol's 99-year history, surpassing the previous record of 98 people in 2022 and 15 people in 2021, according to Customs and Border Protection data.
CBP data published in a Fox News report Tuesday found that more than 10,000 illegal immigrants from special interest countries Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, and Syria had been arrested at the border between October 2021 and October 2023.
The Department of Homeland Security has different definitions for a "special interest alien," or SIA, and "known or suspected terrorist."
"Generally, an SIA is a non-U.S. person who, based on an analysis of travel patterns, potentially poses a national security risk to the United States or its interests. Often such individuals or groups are employing travel patterns known or evaluated to possibly have a nexus to terrorism," the DHS wrote in a 2019 post.
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"This does not mean that all SIAs are 'terrorists,' but rather that the travel and behavior of such individuals indicates a possible nexus to nefarious activity (including terrorism) and, at a minimum, provides indicators that necessitate heightened screening and further investigation," the DHS wrote.
On Monday, the House Judiciary Committee's Republicans published a report that revealed 1.7 million illegal immigrants had been observed by Border Patrol entering the country without permission since Biden took office but, due to a lack of manpower, were not able to be tracked down and arrested.