The amount of immigrants entering the United States from Special Interest Countries is rising, according to numbers from the Department of Homeland Security.
Special Interest Countries are areas that have been flagged as housing potential terror threats to America. An anonymous source with the federal Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency told Breitbart that there were 61,000 Special Interest Migrants—immigrants from Special Interest Countries—encountered at the American border in 2023.
To date, the 2024 fiscal year has already seen a 6% increase in the number of Special Interest Migrants who have been detained while trying to enter the country, compared to all of 2023. This year, nearly 25,000 immigrants from these regions—mostly single men—have been confronted at the border. Most of them have been released while asylum claims are pending.
New bill would require feds to screen border crossers against terror watch list
Current law does not require illegal border crossers to be screened against the terrorist watch list.
Read more ⬇️https://t.co/FVZbKhL3Sy
— Real America's Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) March 28, 2024
Since Oct. 2023, roughly 7,000 of the Special Interest Migrants have come from Turkey and 4,300 from the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. The latter region was first designated as a high crime and terrorism risk zone in 2023 by the State Department. In addition to these two regions, the Homeland Security source indicated that there is an increasing number of illegal immigrants from the Middle East, such as Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Morocco, Syria, Pakistan and Lebanon.
Specifically, the number of those coming from Morocco and Jordan are ten times higher than the same time last fiscal year.
According to the CBP source, there are “thousands” of Special Interest Aliens (SIA)—non-American citizens who pose a potential threat to national security—appearing at the border “each day.” The source added that the high volume of SIAs presents “a struggle” to properly interview, investigate and process these potential security risks.
The rising number of SIAs and immigrants from Special Interest Countries comes amid ongoing tension surrounding the border crisis, which many have blamed President Joe Biden for enabling with his notorious “open border” policies.
/5 In October 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection released statistics showing that they detained more people on the FBI terror watch list in fiscal year 2023 than the last six fiscal years combined. pic.twitter.com/cszMXrNnoP
— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) January 5, 2024
The anonymous source’s report comes six months after the terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, sparked greater concern for national security. Although lawmakers and citizens had already been in disagreement about the border crisis, the massacre from the Palestinian terror group Hamas increased worry that terror threats could be sneaking into America through the southern border.
