This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
Joe Biden's "open border," the result of his decision on taking office to trash the southern border security programs instituted by President Donald Trump, is the "gravest terrorist threat" to the United States, according to a senator.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said in a report at the Washington Examiner that there have been thousands of illegal aliens from "special interest" nations, those with ties to terrorist groups, arrested at that border since Biden took office.
Cotton said that means undoubtedly terrorists already have arrived in the U.S.
"It only took 19 al-Qaida operatives to kill nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001," said Cotton, of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Criminal Justice and Counterterrorism. "Many, many times that number of known terrorists have surely crossed our southern border since Joe Biden took office. His open border is the gravest terrorist threat to the U.S. homeland."
Fears over terror attacks have multiplied in recent days after the terrorists in Hamas launched a brutal, bloody, and "depraved" attack on Israel. More than 1,000 people are dead, mostly innocent civilians, including more than a dozen Americans.
The report explained since fiscal 2023 started last October, U.S. Border Patrol agents on the southern U.S. border have caught 151 non-U.S. citizens who, after being processed, "were determined to be on the FBI's terror watch list for being a terrorist or affiliated with someone who was."
That's the highest number documented by the Border Patrol ever.
CBP records confirm that more than 10,000 illegal immigrants from special interest countries Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, and Syria had been arrested at the border between October 2021 and October 2023.
The Border Patrol said it analyzes fingerprints and facial scans as well as other factors to identify any illegal alien who may be on the FBI's Terrorist Screening Data Set.
The report cited a difference between a "special interest alien" and a "known or suspected terrorist."
The agency explains, "Generally, an SIA is a non-U.S. person who, based on an analysis of travel patterns, potentially poses a national security risk to the United States or its interests. Often such individuals or groups are employing travel patterns known or evaluated to possibly have a nexus to terrorism. … This does not mean that all SIAs are 'terrorists,' but rather that the travel and behavior of such individuals indicate a possible nexus to nefarious activity (including terrorism) and, at a minimum, provide indicators that necessitate heightened screening and further investigation."
The House Judiciary Committee's Republicans released a report that 1.7 million illegal aliens had been observed by Border Patrol entering the country without permission since Biden took office but were not tracked and arrested.
A separate report from Fox News noted the aliens have arrived from Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Mauritania.
And of course, those home countries do not include the hundreds of thousands who arrived but are classified as "got-aways" for having escaped scrutiny.
The Department of Homeland Security's newest threat assessment, from just weeks ago, said agents are seeing a growing number from the watch list, and warned, "terrorists and criminal actors may exploit the elevated flow and increasingly complex security environment to enter the United States."
