Thousands of ‘special interest aliens’ from Middle East countries stopped at southern border since 2021

Spread the love

Loading

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

By Adam Shaw , Bill Melugin , Griff Jenkins

Thousands of “special interest aliens” from countries, including in the Middle East, have been arrested by Border Patrol agents attempting to cross the U.S. southern border illegally over the last two years, internal Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data leaked to Fox News show.

Special Interest aliens are people from countries identified by the U.S. government as having conditions that promote or protect terrorism or potentially pose some sort of national security threat to the U.S.

That data, confirmed by multiple CBP sources and which reflects apprehensions between ports of entry between Oct. 2021 and Oct. 2023, shows that agents encountered 6,386 nationals from Afghanistan in that period, as well as 3,153 from Egypt, 659 from Iran and 538 from Syria.

Agents also encountered 12,624 from Uzbekistan, 30,830 from Turkey, 1,613 from Pakistan, 164 from Lebanon, 185 from Jordan, 123 from Iraq and 15,594 from Mauritania. The data does not include information on how many of those migrants were removed, or who 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.

Meanwhile, FY 2023 broke the record for encounters on the FBI terror watchlist — with 151 people encountered at the southern border between ports of entry, higher than the previous six years combined.

Border Patrol sources tell Fox they have extreme concerns about the people coming across from special interest countries, given they have little to no ways 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.

The data comes as the U.S. is struggling to deal with a new wave of migrants at the southern border, with numbers again hitting historic highs. Sources have told Fox that there were more than 260,000 encounters in September — which marks a new monthly record. Republicans in particular have raised concerns about the potential security threat of an environment in which Border Patrol agents are overwhelmed, and migrants are being processed in significant numbers into the U.S. interior.

The Department of Homeland Security’s threat assessment, published last month, noted that agents have encountered a growing number on the watch list and warned that “terrorists and criminal actors may exploit the elevated flow and increasingly complex security environment to enter the United States.”

Read more

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of

6 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

We are not safe as long as biden acts as if he is president. The southern border has been wide open for any and all terrorists to enter unchecked.

The souther border of Arizona is our Gaza strip.

MAGAs are our Hamas.

No, because Robin Ware/Robert L. Peters/JRB Ware/Pedo Peter/idiot Biden and the Democrats want to let anyone and anything come across our border. It is Gaza without the border security. The crime, disease and drugs simply spreads across the entire country.

They’re being arrested at the border, then? Thanks, Biden!

No they are not moron.