16 Aliens on Terror Watchlist Apprehended Last Month

Since October, U.S. Border Patrol has apprehended 69 illegal aliens on the FBI’s terror watchlist, 16 of which were caught during February 2023 alone, according to new Customs and Border Protection data.

The New York Post reports:

Compare that figure to the same one for all of the agency’s last fiscal year — or 98 non-US citizens on the watch list who were halted — and it appears there will easily be even more caught this fiscal year.

According to CBP’s Office of Field Operations, one non-US citizen on the terror watch list was even caught trying to cross the country’s northern border since October.

For context, in CBP’s FY2021, there were just 15 apprehensions that led to the arrests of watchlist aliens. In FY2020, the agency reported three such apprehensions and zero apprehensions of suspected terrorists the year before.

Aliens on the terror watch list who have been apprehended only account for a small fraction of the overall number of illegals caught at the southern border.

“The Biden administration has presided over a record surge in overall illegal immigration — with a nearly 2.4 million illegal southern-border-crossing arrests in the CBP’s fiscal year 2022,” the N.Y. Post reveals.

Moreover, fiscal year 2023 is already on pace to beat that record, with more than 762,000 border apprehensions already recorded between October and January.

By comparison, the CPB’s fiscal year 2021 saw 1.7 million people caught illegally crossing the U.S.’s southern border. In 2020, that figure was 500,000, and nearly 1 million in 2019.

You can read the full story here.