Border Patrol agents apprehended 15 illegal aliens listed on the FBI’s terror watch list in May, a record number. The potential terrorists were among 239,416 migrants encountered at the southern border last month, according to a breakdown of Customs and Border Patrol figures first reported by the Washington Times.
The total number of May border crossings represents the highest number of illegal alien encounters ever recorded in one month. More than 1.5 million migrant encounters have been recorded at the Southern Border in 2022, according to Border Patrol figures published Wednesday.
“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,” Todd Bensman, author of “America’s Covert Border War,” told the Washington Times.
Bensman, who was responsible for tracking suspected terrorists on the southern border during his time with the Texas Department of Public Safety, said the average used to be one or two every few months.
Mark Morgan, who served as CBP commissioner during the Trump Administration, said the terror watch list migrant encounters represents a growing national security threat.
“I’m concerned that the next terrorist attacker is already in the United States because of this administration’s open border policies,” Morgan told the Washington Times.
In a high-profile example, an Iraqi man living in Ohio was arrested on suspicion of plotting an assassination attempt on former President George W. Bush. Part of the would-be assassin’s plan involved the smuggling of four ISIS-linked extremists across the southern border.
The number of migrant encounters has increased every month in 2022, according to the New York Post.