More migrants on the Terrorism Watch List have crossed the US border

An increasing number of migrants arrested at the southern border in the past year are on the United States’ terrorist watch list, according to government data.

From October last year to September this year, Officials at the southern border arrested 169 people whose names matched those on the watch list, compared to 98 during the previous fiscal year and 15 in 2021, according to government data. But that is a tiny fraction of the total number of migrants apprehended at the border last year, more than two million.

The increase appears to reflect at least two factors: an increase in illegal crossings and the number of people arriving from a wider variety of countries than in previous years.

Yet Republicans have used these figures to attack President Biden for his border policy, which they say makes Americans unsafe.

Representative Mark E. Green, Republican of Tennessee and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, pointed out the arrests Wednesday during a hearing on global threats to the United States.

“Why would these individuals, who under the previous president only 11 tried to cross and were caught, suddenly feel like they could try and succeed?” he asked. (During the 2017-2019 budget years, a total of 11 watch-listed migrants were arrested at the southern border under President Donald J. Trump.)

“And those are exactly the ones we know about,” Mr. Green added. The government estimates that about 600,000 migrants have crossed the southern border without detection.

Christopher A. Wray, the FBI director, acknowledged that the increase in encounters with people associated with known or suspected terrorists was cause for concern. But if we look at the increase in a recent reviewAccording to Homeland Security Department intelligence analysts, this does not reflect the growing threat of terrorism.

Illegal border crossings have been reached under the Biden administration historical highlights. There are also more and more migrants coming from more countries.

According to data collected and analyzed by the immigration court, people from at least 230 countries have been arrested and threatened by the immigration court in the past year Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

The number of migrants from Colombia in particular has increased sharply in the past two years. Some of these people may have had ties to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, once the country’s largest rebel group, according to an intelligence analyst who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss national security issues.

The United States removed the FARC from its list of foreign terrorist organizations nearly two years ago, following a 2016 peace deal in Colombia. decades of conflict.

The terrorist watch list is a broad intelligence database containing well over a million names of known and suspected terrorists, as well as of people associated with them, including family members. When migrants are arrested after crossing the border illegally, officials put their names on the watch list and conduct other background checks.

“In most of these cases, ultimately, through further investigation, it is determined that there is no connection between terrorism and that individual,” said John Cohen, a former counterterrorism adviser who once served as acting head of the Interior Department’s intelligence and analysis division. Safety. .

Customs and Border Protection publishes few details about the people whose names match those on the terrorist watch list or what happens to them next. Border officials will coordinate with the FBI on whether the person should be allowed to remain in the country or removed.

The list has has long been criticized due to the opaque standards under which people’s names are added to it and for generating false matches. It could take years to remove the names of people associated with groups that are no longer considered a terrorist threat.

People are often mistaken for someone on the watchlist because they happen to have the same or a similar name.

The southern border has not historically been a route terrorists have taken to reach the United States. No one has been killed or injured in a terrorist attack in the United States involving anyone who has crossed the border illegally since 1975, said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.