There’s a disturbing trend at the border that’s largely gone unnoticed. The number of people in the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB) who have been arrested at the Southern border has skyrocketed in fiscal year 2022, according to the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP).
The CPB says that 50 people on the watch list have been picked up so far in 2022 compared to just 15 in all of FY 2021. That was up from three in 2020 and zero in 2019.
Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee had requested the numbers after Joe Biden stopped posting them.
The numbers caught by Border Patrol at the southern border are one part of the total number of encounters at the border in general.
At the ports of entry at the northern and southern borders, there have so far been a total of 192 encounters (142 at the northern border and 50 at the southern border) by CBP’s Office of Field Operations. That’s compared to 157 in FY21, 196 in FY 20, 538 in FY19, 351 in FY 18 and 333 in FY17.
The numbers come as CBP revealed this week that there were 239,416 migrant encounters in May — which eclipses the 180,597 encountered in May 2021 and the 23,237 encountered in May 2020. It is also higher than the 235,478 encountered in April 2022, which itself set a new record for encounters.
And don’t forget the “gotaways” — more than 50,000 in May alone and a total of 440,000 for the year to date. Combined with the 400,000 known “gotaways” since the beginning of FY 2021, that means that more than 800,000 illegal immigrants have gotten past agents since October 2020.
“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.”
Our Southern border is a sieve. Unfortunately, it’s going to take a terrorist attack in which the terrorists slip through our horrible security at the Southern border and kill a lot of Americans to finally get Biden to pay attention and guard the border.
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