(The Washington Times) Border Patrol agents nabbed 15 people at the southern border in May who were on the FBI’s terrorist screening database, showing the free-for-all along the U.S.-Mexico boundary is unabated.
The number of people on the terrorist watch list caught crossing the border is a record for any month, equaling all of 2021 and more than the Border Patrol found from 2017 to 2020 combined.
They were among nearly 240,000 total border jumpers Customs and Border Protection nabbed in May, marking the worst month on record for the Biden administration.
Beneath those numbers is something worse.
CBP had nearly 12,000 people in custody on any given day but ousted less than half of the illegal immigrants it encountered. The rest were either released outright at the border or transferred to other agencies, most of which would release them.
The most worrying categories of migrants — unaccompanied juveniles and people traveling as families — also showed significant increases.
About the only good news was on drug seizures. Seizures of drugs in all four major categories — cocaine, fentanyl, heroin and methamphetamine — were down.
The number of seizures, like the arrests of migrants, is considered a rough yardstick of the overall flow. So the drop in drug seizures likely means fewer drugs are getting through the border undetected.
“The big worry is with the chaos down there, when you have these kinds of people coming to the border, you have to assume that some of them got in,” said Todd Bensman, author of “America’s Covert Border War,” an analysis of terrorists attempting to exploit the U.S. immigration system.
Mr. Bensman, now a national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, used to work on border intelligence for the Texas Department of Public Safety and tracked the terrorism numbers. He said the Border Patrol used to average one or two every few months, and 15 was surprising.
“That’s a bad number,” he said. “It’s always a five-alarm fire if somebody comes over who’s on the TSDB.”
