FIRST ON FOX: More than 1.7 million migrants have been encountered at the U.S. border and have come from countries that officials believe pose a national security threat to the United States, according to a new House report.
The report by the House Judiciary Committee says the number of "special interest aliens" (SIAs) came from a congressional staff briefing by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials. SIAs are those who have come from countries identified by the U.S. government as having conditions that promote or protect terrorism or potentially pose some sort of national security threat to the U.S.
In 2019, the DHS defined an SIA as "a non-U.S. person who, based on an analysis of travel patterns, potentially poses a national security risk to the United States or its interests. Often such individuals or groups are employing travel patterns known or evaluated to possibly have a nexus to terrorism."
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"DHS analysis includes an examination of travel patterns, points of origin, and/or travel segments that are tied to current assessments of national and international threat environments," it said.
The House report says that there are currently 26 special interest countries, including Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Syria and Turkey. The agency recently removed 11 countries from the list and added 12 others, including North Korea, China and Venezuela.
The U.S. has seen numerous Chinese and Venezuelan nationals in particular, with nearly 300,000 Venezuelans encountered at the border this fiscal year so far and more than 73,000 Chinese nationals.
Border Patrol sources have previously told Fox News they have extreme concerns about people coming across from special interest countries, given they have little to no way to vet them. Unless they have committed a crime in the U.S. or are on a federal watch list, agents have no way of knowing their criminal history because their countries do not share data with the U.S., so there is nothing to match their name against when authorities run their fingerprints.
The committee said that DHS told the committee that being a national from a special interest country does not affect a migrant’s admissibility into the U.S., although officials have previously stressed that all migrants are vetted using a multi-layered process that includes biographic and biometric information.
As an example of the risks that can be posed by the release of SIA migrants, the committee pointed to the case of Mohammad Kharwin, who was released into the U.S. and later on bond by an immigration judge despite potential terror ties. The DHS located and rearrested him two weeks later. DHS has since agreed to a voluntary departure of Kharwin from the U.S., and he is currently in ICE custody.
"Congress must take seriously its efforts to secure the border and stop the weakening of U.S. national security," the report said.
"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," it said.
The report found that there were around 98,000 SIA encounters in FY 21, which went up to 482,705 in FY 22, then 597,058 in FY 23 and 531,768 in FY 24 so far. Of those, most were encountered at the southern border, with 95,705 southwest border encounters of special interest aliens in fiscal year 2021; 465,664 in 2022; 566,079 in 2023; and 504,215 in 2024 so far.
The increase in SIAs has come amid an ongoing debate about the southern border and how to tackle it. The Biden administration has pointed to a sharp drop in encounters since June, which it attributes to a June presidential proclamation which limited the number of asylum entries into the U.S.
According to those numbers, encounters between ports of entry have decreased by more than 50%, and DHS has removed or returned more than 131,000 individuals to more than 140 countries, including operating more than 400 international repatriation flights.
"In that period, DHS has almost tripled the percentage of noncitizens processed for Expedited Removal, and the percentage of releases pending immigration court proceedings is down nearly half. Total removals and returns over the past year exceed removals and returns in any fiscal year since 2010 and a majority of all southwest border encounters during the past three fiscal years resulted in a removal, return, or expulsion," Customs and Border Protection said in a release last month.
It has also called for the passage of a bipartisan Senate bill that would increase funding to border agencies, including for detention beds, and would also place limits on migrant entries into the U.S. Conservatives have said it would codify high levels of illegal immigration.
Vice President Kamala Harris visited the border in Arizona last week and hammered former President Donald Trump for his lack of support for the bipartisan bill. However, Republicans have noted that the House passed a sweeping border security bill last year, but the Senate has yet to pass that either.
Fox News' Bill Melugin contributed to this report.
