Surge halts screenings of terrorism suspects; border officers lack time, tools

To sniff out a terrorism suspect at the border, Border Patrol agents need time to ask questions and often need translators for non-English speakers.

Thanks to the unprecedented surge of illegal immigrants under President Biden, agents don’t have the time or the chance to access language tools and probe the backstories the migrants are telling, said Rodney Scott, a former chief of the Border Patrol.

“Overwhelmed officers and agents no longer have time to conduct meaningful interviews,” Mr. Scott told Congress on Thursday. “Border Patrol is overwhelmed with illegal aliens from several countries that are known to be affiliated with terrorism, but those agents cannot get timely language translation support to conduct the most basic processing, let alone a meaningful interview.”

The number of illegal immigrant terrorism suspects — people whose names trigger the government’s terrorism watchlist — is breaking records, igniting a debate on the reality of the threat of a terrorist encroachment at the southern border.

Like so much else in the immigration debate, perspectives are deeply divided.

Democrats dismissed Mr. Scott’s concerns, aired at a House Judiciary Committee hearing, saying the likelihood of a terrorist using the southern border to sneak into the U.S. is slim. They said the idea is an attempt to demonize the broader swath of illegal immigrants who show up seeking better jobs or a chance to reunite with relatives.

“Do you favor deporting 10 million taxpaying undocumented workers from the U.S. right now?” said Rep. Lou Correa, California Democrat.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, New York Democrat, said terrorism suspects make up a small fraction of a percent of the total flow of people.

Mr. Scott laid out his argument. He said his experiences as a Border Patrol agent on the front lines and then working on joint task forces and as the nation’s chief agent until he was ousted by the Biden administration “scare the hell out of me.”

He said holes in border security are scary and the assurances from senior Department of Homeland Security officials are empty.

When officials say new arrivals are vetted, that means the names they gave and their fingerprints are run against U.S. databases. Still, that doesn’t help if U.S. authorities have never flagged them.

“It’s the equivalent of checking them in, basically an empty hard drive,” Mr. Scott said. “It sounds really good. It’s really doing nothing.”

He said the real check comes from a trained agent interviewing migrants, looking at tattoos and taking the measure of their statements. That, he said, has become impossible.

“That is not taking place today because of the massive flow,” the former Border Patrol chief said.

Those are the people the agents catch. It doesn’t include those who have evaded capture.

Mr. Scott said smuggling cartels have mastered the art of distraction by sending some migrants in an initial wave across the border to draw the attention of agents and then sending a second wave through the gaps the agents left when they converged on the first wave.

“The most serious threats to America are more commonly in that second wave,” he said.

The answer, Mr. Scott said, is to deter crossings. Fewer people crossing the border means fewer distractions for agents.

Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute, said if history is any guide, there is no reason to be worried.

“Zero people have been murdered in attacks by terrorists who entered as illegal immigrants,” Mr. Nowrasteh said.

He pointed out that the 2001 terrorist attackers entered legally, though some were in the U.S. illegally at the time of the airliner plot because their status had expired.

“The chance of dying from a foreign-born terrorist attack since 1975 is 1 in 4.4 million per year,” he said.

“I’m sure that is great comfort to the families of people from 9/11,” countered Rep. Chip Roy, Texas Republican.

Some worrying signs have emerged.

The FBI revealed last year that it had upended a plot by an Iraqi asylum-seeker who entered the U.S. on a fraudulent visa and was trying to smuggle in an Islamic State hit team. Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab told an FBI informant that he previously smuggled in two Hezbollah-linked illegal immigrants, charging them $50,000 each.

Shihab has entered a guilty plea to attempting to provide support to terrorists and is awaiting sentencing.

CNN reported late last month that the government scrambled to track down more than a dozen caught-and-released illegal immigrants from Uzbekistan after learning that someone with ties to the Islamic State group had smuggled them into the country.

The biggest yardstick for potential terrorism activity is the Terrorism Screening Data Set, also known as the terrorism watchlist.

Over the first 10 months of fiscal 2023, Border Patrol agents at the southern border nabbed 146 people whose identities triggered the watchlist. That was up from 98 last year and 15 in 2021. By contrast, agents tallied just 11 encounters from 2017 to 2020 during the Trump administration.

Mr. Nowrasteh questioned the value of the watchlist. He said most people on it “are not terrorists.”

He said the list is bloated with names added without much scrutiny. He said 99% of names nominated for the list by agencies are included.

Mr. Nowrasteh said a surge in illegal immigration from Colombia could be responsible for the rising numbers of terrorist watchlist migrants, primarily because of people from rebel insurgencies.

He said those Colombian groups have given no indication that they intend to harm the U.S.

Todd Bensman, author of “America’s Covert Border War,” a study of terrorism and the border, told lawmakers that it is wrong to minimize the dangers of the Colombian rebels.

“Those are people who have spent years and years involved in murder, kidnapping, drug trafficking, extortion, bombings. They are experts in weaponry,” Mr. Bensman said. “A terrible development that we should pay attention to.”