Federal agents at one of the nation’s busiest border crossings failed to screen illegal immigrants from a country that poses a security threat to the United States as record numbers of the Special Interest Aliens (SIAs) poured in through its California sector. The SIAs—identified by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as foreign nationals originating from countries with possible or established links to terrorism—from Central Asia were being smuggled into the U.S. through Mexico in record numbers yet Border Patrol agents in San Diego did not have a process for identifying or vetting them like their counterparts in other southwest border sectors during an unprecedented illegal immigration crisis. The lapse resulted in missed opportunities to identify aliens who posed a potential risk to national security and to collect information about smuggling networks, according to a report made public—with extensive redactions—this month by the DHS Inspector General.

The watchdog reveals that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents encountered more than a fourfold increase of SIAs from one Central Asian country with known terrorist ties, from approximately 3,000 in fiscal year 2022 to an alarming 13,000 in 2023, yet the frontline DHS agency did not have a consistent mechanism to identify and provide additional screening of the potentially dangerous migrants. The specific country is redacted throughout the lengthy DHS report but it is likely Uzbekistan, a Muslim former Soviet nation that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) confirms is home to a number of renowned terrorist groups including Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham-Khorasan (ISIS-K). “According to CBP, smuggling networks scheduled aliens’ flights to Latin America, and then organized their travel by land through Baja California, Mexico,” the DHS IG report states. “Subsequently aliens often arrived at the U.S. border in San Diego and nearby areas.” Many scheduled appointments with the Biden administration’s disastrous CBP One App, which released hundreds of thousands of otherwise inadmissible illegal immigrants into the U.S., including those from hostile nations.

The probe found that because CBP did not have an agency-wide policy to identify aliens from certain countries as SIAs, thousands of illegal immigrants from nations with links to terrorism entered at least one region that did not provide additional screening. The biggest offender was the then highly transited San Diego sector, where authorities estimate 65% of SIAs from the unnamed Central Asian nation with terrorist ties entered the U.S. during the first half of 2023 alone. The abrupt surge caused alarm among CBP officials who expressed concerns that smuggling networks responsible for the increase of migration could pose a national security threat, the DHS watchdog report reveals. The probe focuses on this narrow period of the Biden administration’s years-long open border disaster that welcomed a ghastly 7.6 million illegal immigrants, including hundreds of thousands with serious criminal records. By the time the SIA lapse was exposed in July 2023, the problem was out of control. San Diego Border Patrol task force agents (TFOs) assigned to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Joint Terrorism Task Force requested that frontline officers screen SIAs, but that did not occur. “Agents told us there were too many aliens in custody matching TFOs’ requests to interview before releasing them,” the report says.

The terrorist threat to the U.S. skyrocketed under the dangerous Biden-Harris open border policies with more than 1.7 million illegal immigrants from countries that DHS determined pose a national security threat to the United States entering the country and dozens that appear on the terrorist watchlist released into American communities. SIAs came from some 26 nations, including Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Syria, and Turkey, China, North Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Mauritania, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Venezuela. Afghan Mohammad Kharwin is an example of a terrorist released in the U.S. after getting arrested by Border Patrol near Imperial Beach, California in early 2023. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) placed him on its non-detained docket along with millions of other illegal aliens and instructed him to report to an ICE office in Sacramento, California even though he is a member of Hezb-e-Islami, a group responsible for attacks in Afghanistan that killed at least nine American soldiers and civilians from 2013 to 2015.

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