Is Illegal Immigration A Terrorism Threat?

Vanishingly few individuals who pose a terrorism threat to the United States are caught by U.S. Border Patrol agents. 

Those individuals who are arrested while on the list are overwhelmingly there simply because the U.S. government hasn't updated its terrorist watchlist database to reflect new diplomatic developments.

The conservative Washington Examiner notes that about seven out of each 10,000 people arrested by the border patrol agency for illegally entering the U.S. are on a terrorism watch list:

Border Patrol agents on the Canadian and Mexican borders have caught 127 noncitizens listed on the FBI's terror watchlist who tried to enter the United States illegally since the start of fiscal 2023, according to newly released federal data.

Numbers published by U.S. Customs and Border Protection on Tuesday showed terror watchlist apprehensions between the eight months of October 2022 and May 2023 were higher than last year's 98 arrests over 12 months, which until now was the highest level in at least the last four years when comparable data are available.

The 98 in 2022 and 127 thus far this year represent major spikes from zero in 2019 when the U.S. border faced a smaller-scale humanitarian and national security crisis.

The nearly two dozen people stopped in May alone were among more than 170,000 people arrested by Border Patrol for entering the country illegally by going around the ports of entry.

But, deeper into the story it notes that about 93% of them were Columbians who should have been removed from the watch list if Border Patrol records were up to date:

That data revealed that in the first six months of 2022, 25 of the 27 known or suspected terrorists arrested by Border Patrol were citizens of Colombia, not countries in the Eastern Hemisphere, where terrorist groups al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and others are based.

Immigration analyst Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute in Washington noted at the time that some Colombians on the watchlist might not be true terror threats.

“It’s ... possible that the individual Colombians apprehended were affiliated with FARC or the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia, which have since been delisted as Foreign Terrorist Organizations by the State Department, but their individual names are still in the TSDS and haven’t been purged,” Nowrasteh said.

The State Department lists two Colombian groups as foreign terrorist organizations: the Segunda Marquetalia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army, or FARC-EP.

These groups were on one side of a civil war in Colombia that has basically been resolved now. There has never been a terrorist incident in the U.S. committed by a Columbian terrorism group.

Less than one in 20,000 people who are arrested for illegally entering the country by Border Patrol agents are people on a terrorism watch list who are not Columbian, and it isn't clear that any of them are from groups that actually pose a threat when in the U.S.

Any terrorist organization serious about their task, such as the 9-11 terrorists, would have someone who is not on a terrorism watch list enter the U.S. on a legal visa, for example, for tourism or on a student visa, rather than illegally crossing the border.

Border patrol arrests provide no meaningful barrier preventing terrorists from entering the United States, and U.S. border patrol policies should not be justified on that basis.