Biden Behind 2023’s Largest National Security Risk: Immigration

While the Biden administration is spending billions to help Ukraine repel the unprovoked Russian invasion, little or nothing is being done to keep America safe from massive illegal immigration. It is perhaps the most significant and immediate threat to US national security. It took only 11 terrorists to bring down the World Trade Center and destroy a section of the Pentagon. On Joe Biden's watch, more than eight times that number of potential terrorists have been caught trying to enter the United States illegally. As Liberty Nation reported,  illegal aliens streaming across America’s southern border could prove to be a greater threat near term to US national security than China.

Senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies Todd Bensman, who recently wrote the book Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in US History, put the problem succinctly:

"Millions of foreign nationals have overrun the southern border, starting on Inauguration Day in 2021, and millions more will cross over by the end of President Joe Biden's term in 2024. This event is historic by all measures, exceeding even the storied chronicles of Ellis Island, and portends the same permanent change for the nation."

Border Patrol’s Immigration Statistics Alarming

The US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistical story is even more alarming. Bensman wrote in a Newsweek article: "Final fiscal year 2022 numbers show Border Patrol apprehended a whopping 98 watch-listed terrorists at the southern border, six times the record 15 caught there in 2021 (three were caught in 2020 and none in 2019)."

Even more illegal aliens with criminal records or outstanding warrants were encountered. The FY2022 statistics show that CBP encountered 561,291 such individuals, or nearly a quarter of all illegal aliens encountered in the period. Last year, the CBP dealt with 2,378,944 migrants attempting to cross illegally. If you thought these were poor families seeking a better life or trying to escape persecution in their homeland, think again. Of the 411,125 illegals apprehended in just the first two months of FY2023, 71%, or 290,472, were single adults. Furthermore, of the 1,956,519 million illegal migrants stopped at the border in 2021, 27% (528,260) were recidivists, having crossed illegally, been deported, and caught a second, third, fourth, or more times.

Now, here is a chilling statistic. "US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has 'no records' of the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants it released into the United States," reported Tim Pearce in the Daily Wire. He explained that ICE could not account for 377,380 illegal aliens the agency had released into US neighborhoods. This information was made available by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearing House (TRAC) through a Freedom of Information request.

Homeland Security Doesn’t Know Where the Illegals Are

TRAC had asked for data on individuals who had crossed the border illegally and were placed in a program called Alternatives to Detention (ATD), where ICE monitors GPS ankle bracelets to keep track of those released. TRAC Assistant Professor Austin Kocher tweeted incredulously: "Just days after announcing that the agency had been misleading to the public for months about how many immigrants were on GPS ankle monitors, @icegov claims it can't find records on over 350,000 immigrants in alternatives to detention program." In other words, ATD is just another way of saying welcome to America, where we don't enforce the law.

The "gotaway" problem is not new. In the first months of the Biden administration, "[a]t least 270,000 migrants have sneaked into the US and burrowed into communities across the country so far this fiscal year … Agents know them as 'gotaways' who represent an acute national security risk," the National Sheriffs' Association's border security committee said, according to Stephen Dinan reporting for The Washington Times. How many of those eluding capture are would-be terrorists? Dinan explained the sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona, warned that, in his region, these people "are coming dressed head to toe in camouflage, being smuggled by cartels." The sheriff described a border situation where the CBP is missing nearly 1,100 of the camo-cladded a day.

The Biden administration's disregard for national security is a growing crisis. It is only a matter of time before the situation deteriorates into a major terrorist disaster. Without policy changes in the new year, the border crisis will continue to be a major problem in defending the United States. The White House should understand that national security starts at home.

The views expressed are those of the author and not of any other affiliation.