This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
For years already, there have been high levels of concern that "sleeper cells" of terrorists have been infiltrating the United States by crossing its southern border illegally.
It was one of President Donald Trump's main concerns, and the reason for his creation of a number of security measures to crack down on such trafficking.
After all, although they came in legally, it was a terror cell of radical Islamists who hijacked four jets and killed nearly 3,000 people on 9/11.
Trump even tried to restrict unlimited immigration from nations that sponsor, or at least allow, terror to exist.
Even now, the government labels such aliens, when they are encountered, "Special Interest Aliens."
But now a report from the Center for Immigration Studies reveals it has uncovered documentation confirming the Biden administration "has been authorizing thousands of SIAs for escorted entries through land ports along the border since at least May 2021, using 'CBP One' online interfaces such as a mobile phone app."
The center explained through that program, Biden authorized the paroles into the country of some 7,332 SIAs from 24 countries including Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
The largest numbers actually came from Muslim-majority former Soviet republics in Central Asia such as the Kyrgyz Republic and Uzbekistan.
The report explained security professionals have worried about the infiltration of terror suspects because the presumption is that they "pose a greater national security risk than other illegal entrants."
But these newcomers, since they are pre-approved before they are escorted through entry points, raise questions about whether the "Biden administration’s DHS is conducting effective enhanced security screening beyond the standard criminal database checks used for the more than 249,000 non-SIA immigrants the CIS FOIA records show it has paroled in since May 2021 through eight land ports."
The dispute arises "at a time of heightened national concern about not only illegally entering SIA traffic at the southern border amid a historic mass migration but concern specifically about the record 270 aliens on the FBI’s terrorism watch list who have crossed illegally during the Biden administration."
The report noted Biden's administration never had disclosed that it was knowingly approving SIAs for admission.
"That’s a really hard target to analyze, and to just shoot from the hip and let them in is absolute insanity in my book," James G. Conway, a retired FBI counterterrorism agent who for years after 9/11 worked in Mexico trying to detect terrorists, told the center.
"How would you knowingly and wittingly bring people from terrorist countries into the United States with that level of vetting? Some of these terrorist countries don’t even have an electric grid let alone a computer system, and you can’t scrub them on databases that don’t exist. The whole thing is insane to me."
While individuals being admitted are not necessarily terrorists, they come as strangers from nations "where avowed anti-U.S. terrorist groups are prevalent," the report said.
Among the millions that Biden's open borders practice has allowed into the United States, the center documented, are "more than 75,000 SIAs" just between October 2022 and August 2023.
A report at Fox News noted border security expert Lora Ries warned, "We have to act like the sleeper cells are already here in the U.S. and preemptively find them, and they should be detained."
CBP recently said in a memo that people "inspired by, or reacting to, the current Israel-Hamas conflict may attempt travel to or from the area of hostilities in the Middle East via circuitous transit across the Southwest border."
Specifically, the warning cited Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Hezbollah.
She blamed the Biden administration for "open border" policies potentially attracting bad actors to the U.S.
"Secretary Mayorkas of Homeland Security unfortunately has directed ICE to not arrest, not investigate, not detain a lot of many of the illegal aliens here. And Americans shouldn't wait for a terror attack to happen for the Biden administration to act," she warned.
Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said in an interview this week there's been a 7,000% increase in suspects on the terror watch list caught during Biden's administration, from President Donald Trump's.
And there there are the tens of thousands of "got-aways" who are completely untracked.