More than 1.7 million illegal immigrants from countries that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has determined pose a national security threat to the United States have entered the country under the Biden administration’s ruinous open border policies and dozens that appear on the terrorist watchlist have been released into American communities, according to government figures reluctantly provided to Congress. The alarming stats also reveal that in just over three-and-a-half years the administration, led by border czar Kamala Harris, has welcomed into the country a ghastly 7.6 million illegal aliens, including nearly 2 million who sneaked over the border without getting arrested. The government calls them “gotaways” and earlier this year a U.S. Senator from Missouri blasted DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for allowing more “gotaways” to enter the country through the southern border than the combined populations of his state’s two largest cities, St. Louis and Kansas City.
The numbers have increased significantly since the Missouri lawmaker pressed Mayorkas on the issue, according to the latest figures included in a report published this month by the House Judiciary Committee. At the time, in late January, 860,000 illegal immigrants crossed into the United States without encountering a border official. The number has surged to at least 1.9 million, according to updated DHS figures embedded in the report. “Among those largely unvetted aliens are at least 382 illegal aliens on the U.S. government’s terrorist watchlist who have been encountered by Border Patrol along the southwest border since January 2021, with 100 watchlisted alien encounters so far in fiscal year 2024,” the report states, adding the obvious; “the terrorist threat to the United States has skyrocketed due to the Biden-Harris Administration’s dangerous open-borders policies.” As an example, the congressional panel offers that of the more than 250 illegal aliens on the terrorist watchlist who were encountered by Border Patrol at the southwest border between fiscal years 2021 and 2023, DHS has released into American communities at least 99, with 34 others in the agency’s custody but not yet removed from the country.
The migrants from countries that pose a security threat to the U.S. are labeled Special Interest Aliens (SIA) by the government and they come from some 26 nations, including Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Syria, and Turkey, China, North Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Mauritania, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Venezuela. “Despite recognizing that nationals from special interest countries may pose a heightened threat to the United States, the Biden-Harris Administration maintains that being a national of a special interest country does not affect an illegal alien’s admissibility to the United States,” the congressional committee found. The panel also reveals that last month a former senior Border Patrol official told Congress that he was ordered to “not release any information” on the increase of special interest aliens “or mention any of the arrests” because the Biden-Harris administration “was trying to convince the public there was no threat at the border.”
A specific case cited in the report illustrates how the government risks public safety and national security by releasing SIA migrants inside the country. It involves an illegal alien from Afghanistan, Mohammad Kharwin, arrested by Border Patrol near Imperial Beach, California in early 2023. Federal agents suspected he was on the U.S. terrorist watchlist because information matched a person on the list. Nevertheless, the feds released Kharwin in the U.S. He flew from Istanbul, Turkey to Mexico City, Mexico before traveling to the U.S. border and, despite red flags, 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. Around two weeks later, ICE removed Kharwin from its Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program and DHS allowed him to apply for asylum and work authorization and fly domestically. The Afghan national remained free in the United States for about a year until biometric and biographical information positively identified him on the terrorist watchlist and ICE Fugitive Operations arrested him in San Antonio, Texas. Kharwin is reportedly 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. “As the case of Mohammad Kharwin exemplifies, the Biden-Harris Administration has sown chaos at America’s borders and allowed potential national security and counterintelligence threats to enter the United States—and, at least in Kharwin’s case, be released into the country multiple times,” the House Judiciary Committee report states.
