The Border Patrol reported encountering 29 terrorism suspects along the southern border in May, setting a new single-month record even as the government said the overall pace of illegal border crossings dipped.
Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the Border Patrol, said agents have now nabbed 125 people at the southern border whose names are flagged in the terrorist watchlist since the start of the fiscal year in October.
Even with four months to go in this fiscal year, that number still shatters the previous record set under President Biden last year, when agents encountered 98.
The new numbers were released Tuesday as part of a broader set of data suggesting major shifts in illegal immigration since the end of the Title 42 pandemic border policy on May 11 and the return to normal enforcement of immigration law under what is known as Title 8.
Nationwide, CBP reported 273,141 unauthorized migrants caught entering in May, which was down by about 2,000 compared to April. That includes both people who showed up at ports of entry without an entry visa, and migrants caught trying to sneak in between the ports.
Illegal entries at the southern border with Mexico were down, slightly, while illegal entries at the northern border with Canada were up, as were unauthorized migrants arriving at airports inside the U.S.
That’s what the Biden team wants.
The administration has created policies that attempt to shift would-be illegal immigrants away from the southern border by offering them legally iffy pathways into the U.S. if they schedule appointments and show up at official ports of entry. Those who take advantage of the program are caught and released under Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s power of “parole.”
CBP celebrated the changes Tuesday.
“As a result of comprehensive planning and preparation efforts, there has been a significant reduction in encounters along the Southwest border since the return to full Title 8 immigration enforcement on May 12,” said acting CBP Commissioner Troy A. Miller.
He said the border was particularly rough in the days before Title 42 lifted, with more than half of the Border Patrol’s apprehensions coming in the first 11 days of the month. Several days saw more than 10,000 apprehensions apiece.
But since Title 42 ended, the Border Patrol is averaging about 3,500 arrests a day.
It’s not clear from the data when the surge of terrorism suspects came.
CBP regularly finds people on the watchlist who come through the official border crossings, but it’s been rare for the Border Patrol, which polices between the border crossings, to catch terrorism suspects.
Indeed, from 2017 to 2020 agents reported just 11 for all four years combined.
But the numbers started rising under Mr. Biden, with 15 terrorism suspects encountered in 2021 and 96 encountered last year, and now 125 this year.
Two more terrorism suspects have been nabbed by agents at the northern border this fiscal year.
The rise in numbers caught is worrying because agents say that it means more are also getting through.
Being on the watchlist doesn’t automatically mean someone has engaged in terrorism, according to civil-rights advocates who say the list is too broad.
Rodney Scott, who was chief of the Border Patrol before being ousted by the Biden administration in 2021, told Congress last week that the numbers suggest a real “national security threat,” and it’s tied to the overwhelming numbers of illegal immigrants entering.
“Cartels use illegal aliens to overwhelm law enforcement, creating controllable gaps in border security. These gaps are exploited to smuggle anything they want into the United States,” he said. “To think that terrorist networks and hostile nations are not exploiting this vulnerability is naive.”
The House Oversight and Accountability, Judiciary and Homeland Security committees last month began a probe into the soaring terrorism numbers.
The chairmen asked Mr. Mayorkas to turn over the immigration files and detention history of all illegal immigrants caught at the southwest border who were flagged by the TSDB during the Biden administration.
They also asked for Homeland Security’s estimates of terrorism suspects within the population of “gotaways,” or illegal immigrants known to have evaded capture at the border.
