Just a few years ago, major U.S. media outlets called President Donald Trump a liar when he proclaimed that Islamic terrorist suspects were illegally crossing the southern border among far more numerous Spanish-speaking immigrants. “Fact-check” columnists swore such terrorist crossings never happened.
But since April 2022, when U.S. Customs and Border Protection began publishing the monthly number of border crossers who were on the FBI‘s terrorism watch list, it has become impossible to ignore the record-breaking numbers of suspected terrorist crossings.
Final fiscal year 2022 numbers show Border Patrol apprehended a whopping 98 watch-listed terrorists at the southern border, six times the record 15 caught there in 2021 (three were caught in 2020 and none in 2019). That’s also five times the number it took to carry out the 9/11 attacks that took America to war in overseas theaters for 20 years.
For even more perspective, my 2021 book America’s Covert Border War: The Untold Story of the Nation’s Battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration, quoted intelligence officials saying that American authorities caught about 100 on the FBI watch list between 2012 and 2017. That included individuals still en route and south of the border. The 98 ensnared in just fiscal year 2022 had all reached the border.
All of this puts a sharp national security edge on Biden’s mass migration border crisis, the greatest in U.S. history by any measure. Biden’s first year broke all prior Border Patrol apprehension records dating to when the government began keeping them in 1960, at more than 1.7 million. Fiscal year 2022 came in at just under 2.4 million apprehensions. None of these apprehensions include the estimated two million who were not detained.
People are pouring in at the simply incredible average rate of 200,000 every month, with no end in sight.
By Todd Bensman
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