Newly-released Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) data show that more then 70,000 "special interest aliens," most from Middle East countries, have been apprehended trying to cross Joe Biden's open border in the past two years.
"A special interest alien is a term used by the U.S. government to refer to people coming from countries that have conditions that favor or harbor terrorism, or pose a potential national security threat to the U.S.," Fox News immigration reporter Bill Melugin noted in a social media post on Tuesday.
Related: Elections have consequences: Terrorism returns with a vengeance in Israel, USA, October 9, 2023
The CBP did not report how many of those "special interest aliens" were removed, or how many were released into the U.S. with a court date.
"Those numbers do not include encounters by CBP’s Office of Field Operations at ports of entry. It also does not include the numbers who have snuck past agents without detection — sources say there have been over 1.5 million such 'gotaways' during the Biden administration," Melugin noted.
From Oct. 1, 2021 to Oct. 4, 2023, CBP recorded apprehending "special interest aliens" from the following countries:
Turkey: 30,830
Mauritania: 15,594
Uzbekistan: 13,624
Afghanistan: 6,386
Egypt: 3,153
Pakistan: 1,613
Iran: 659
Syria: 538
Lebanon: 164
Yemen: 139
Iraq: 123
Melugin added: "Border Patrol sources tell Fox they have extreme concerns about the people coming across from special interest countries, given they have little to no way to vet them — unless they have committed a crime in the U.S. or are on a federal watchlist, agents have no way of knowing their criminal history as their countries do not share data with the U.S. and so there is nothing to match their name against when they run their fingerprints."
Last month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published a threat assessment which stated that U.S. border agents have encountered a growing number of individuals on the terrorism watch list and warned that "terrorists and criminal actors may exploit the elevated flow and increasingly complex security environment to enter the United States."
"Individuals with terrorism connections are interested in using established travel routes and permissive environments to facilitate access to the United States," the assessment added.
Fiscal Year 2023 set a new record for border encounters involving individuals on the FBI terrorism watchlist with 151 encounters at the southern border between ports of entry. That number was higher than the previous six years combined.
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