On June 25, NBC News reported that 400-plus migrants “from Central Asia and elsewhere” were smuggled into the United States “by an ISIS-affiliated human smuggling network”. That’s not good, but worse is the fact ICE is frantically searching for 50 of them, many of whom were apprehended at the border and released into the country “because they were not on the government’s terrorism watchlist”. Perhaps DHS should have been doing what Congress has mandated and detained them all. This news comes on the heels of a report by the DHS Office of Inspector General (DHS OIG) — the department’s watchdog — warning that flaws in DHS vetting system could expose the country to risk.
“DHS Needs to Improve Its Screening and Vetting of Asylum Seekers”. The DHS OIG report is captioned “DHS Needs to Improve Its Screening and Vetting of Asylum Seekers and Noncitizens Applying for Admission into the United States”.
Read it and you’ll see the headline is an understatement, as the report details flaws and inadequacies in the process the Department of Homeland Security uses to vet aliens — both legal and otherwise — coming to the United States, and thus to fulfill its key duty to, you know, secure the U.S. homeland.
Why such major flaws in DHS’s vetting system have gone unfixed even as the number of “asylum seekers” has surged is an issue, but the real question is why nobody’s talking about this report, which focuses on the screening and vetting capabilities of CBP at the ports of entry and USCIS in the course of adjudicating asylum claims.
That said, the screening and vetting vulnerabilities identified by DHS OIG would apply to Border Patrol’s screening of illegal entrants prior to their release into the United States, as well.
“CBP Could Not Access All Biometric Data for Complete Screening and Vetting”. The report describes in detail the tools CBP officers in the agency’s Office of Field Operations (OFO) utilize in the screening and vetting process.
Briefly, officers review admissions documents and collect biometric information on travelers seeking admission during primary inspection. That information is then fed into the agency’s Automated Targeting System, which queries various law-enforcement, intelligence, and “other databases”.
If that query returns any derogatory information, or the CBP officer has questions about the traveler’s intentions or identity, the traveler is referred for a more vigorous secondary inspection, at which “CBP’s secondary inspection technology system” — Unified Secondary (USEC) — is used to assess admissibility.
So far, so good.
The problem, according to DHS OIG, is that “DHS’ biometric system, the Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT), could not access all data from Federal partners to ensure complete screening and vetting of [aliens] seeking admission into the United States.”
Specifically — and most importantly — CBP’s IDENT users cannot access the biometric data in the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS), which includes DoD’s Biometrically Enabled Watchlist (BEWL).
As DHS OIG explains: “BEWL is a subset of biometrically based identities in ABIS that are categorized as persons of interest to DoD, who are identified by biometric data sample instead of by name, date of birth, or other biographic identifiers” — people like terrorists and foreign fighters, whose prints may appear on ordinance or have been captured by authorities abroad.
“Until the Department addresses these [database] challenges, DHS will remain at risk of admitting dangerous persons into the country”
That’s not to say that there is no interoperability between IDENT and BEWL — there is and has been since 2020. ABIS users can query IDENT for matches, but IDENT users can’t query biometric information in ABIS.
Apparently, the CBP flow — 360,000 IDENT queries per day, matching the number of travelers to the United States on a daily basis — could not be supported by the DoD ABIS system. IDENT does have a copy of 96 percent of ABIS data and 99 percent of BEWL data for DHS to query, but things move quickly in an increasingly dangerous world, and this may be one of those situations in which “good enough” isn’t.
As DHS OIG concluded: “Until the Department addresses these challenges, DHS will remain at risk of admitting dangerous persons into the country or enabling asylum seekers who may pose significant threats to public safety and national security to continue to reside in the United States.”
“400 Migrants Brought to the U.S. by an ISIS-Affiliated Human Smuggling Network”. Keep all this in mind as I discuss the NBC News Report, headlined “DHS identifies over 400 migrants brought to the U.S. by an ISIS-affiliated human smuggling network”.
The headline is fairly shocking, but the subhead really tells the tale: “Over 150 have been arrested, but the whereabouts of over 50 remain unknown, officials said. ICE is looking to arrest them on immigration charges when they are found.”
As I noted at the outset, DHS has identified all 400 as “subjects of concern”, but the department didn’t reach that determination when they were initially encountered. According to the outlet: “Many of the more than 400 migrants crossed the southern border and were released into the U.S. by Customs and Border Protection because they were not on the government’s terrorism watchlist.”
The Terrorism Watchlist. I served as chief of the former INS’s National Security Law Division leading up to September 11th, and can tell you that prior to those attacks, there was no single “terrorism watchlist”.
Instead, there were several such lists spread across various government agencies, all based on the intelligence they had and the criteria that they used. Most agencies were highly protective of their sources and methods, which made those lists (curiously and unfortunately) unduly challenging to access.
The Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) at the FBI was created after 9/11 to consolidate all that scattered terrorist information into one watchlist. As TSC explains, “This watchlist has information on people reasonably suspected to be involved in terrorism (or related activities).”
It continues: “Most people on the terrorism watchlist are not Americans, and they have no known connection to the U.S.” Until, of course, they do have a “connection” to this country, as in the case of those 400 migrant “subjects of concern”.
From 400 to 150 to 50. It appears that NBC News rushed this report to press, because it quickly jumps to 150 of those 400 migrants who were smuggled into the country. Some of those 150 have already been removed, some “may have already left the U.S. voluntarily” (a little more certainty would help), and officials apparently know where others (spread across 17 states) are.
Interestingly, NBC News asserts that the migrants whose whereabouts are known “may be arrested soon”. It’s difficult to know whether that statement is made innocently or cheekily. I’ve been doing this for 32 years, and there’s no reason they’re not all in ICE detention, awaiting due process.
In any event, the outlet claims that “the whereabouts of over 50 remain unknown”, and ICE “is looking to arrest them on immigration charges when they are located”. For the sake of homeland security, I hope that’s the case, but — and again, I’ve done this job in the past — none of them should ever have been released.
I served as an associate general counsel on the INS National Security Law Division during the Clinton administration under then-Attorney General Janet Reno, and can assure you that both she and the White House became concerned whenever Border Patrol apprehended anybody from a terrorist haven.
Border Patrol agents are under administration pressure to process apprehended migrants in between 15 minutes and 2.5 hours.
My sleep was regularly interrupted when some random migrant from Pakistan or Afghanistan popped up on agents’ radar. And I was often intimately involved in the determination of how, exactly, their cases would be processed. Release was never on the list of options.
Under Biden, however, it appears line Border Patrol agents — not the DHS secretary — bear the burden of deciding whether such aliens will be detained or released, and don’t get much time to do so. A federal district court order from March 2023 explains that agents are under administration pressure to process apprehended migrants in between 15 minutes and 2.5 hours.
The creation of the TSC was just one of many reforms implemented in response to the lessons learned from September 11th. DHS itself was another. It appears, however, that all of those lessons have been lost or ignored by whoever is crafting the Biden administration’s border policy. I doubt Reno would have approved.
Terrorism Watchlist Migrants Just “.014% of All CBP Encounters”. None of this should panic you, however, at least according to NBC News, which asserts:
Since October, the number of migrants crossing into the U.S. from Mexico and Canada that authorities have matched with names on the terrorism watchlist has made up .014% of all CBP encounters, or slightly less than one out of every 7,000 migrants vetted, according to CBP data.
That may come as a relief — but only to those who either aren’t good at math or who haven’t read the rest of that article or perused the DHS OIG report.
The report details the vulnerabilities in DHS’s screening and vetting procedures, while the article goes to great lengths to explain that many of those 400 migrants who were “brought by an ISIS-affiliated human smuggling network” were released by CBP “because they were not on the government’s terrorism watchlist”.
Is DHS going to readjust its “CBP data” showing that only .014 percent of CBP encounters involve aliens on the terrorist watchlist now that we know about those 400 migrants who weren’t on the watchlist? Will it review all that DoD ABIS and BEWL data it couldn’t access and add anybody it finds therein? I would not hold my breath if I were you.
In any event, it’s a garbage statistic, and NBC News should know it.
According to MIT, the odds you will die in a plane crash are just one in 7.9 million — a .00000013 percent risk. And yet, we have an entire Department of Transportation and it has a Federal Aviation Administration that’s dedicated to ensuring no one dies on a flight.
And that’s not all, because DHS itself employs 50,000 officers at the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) whose sole job is to “keep people secure” in the air. Half of them “have five years or more experience as counterterrorism professionals”.
You play your part, too, when you queue up at the TSA checkpoint in your local airport, hand your ID to the officer (who runs record checks on you, and that’s after the airline passes your information over to the agency to run preliminary checks), and then dutifully take off your shoes and remove your laptop and before walking through a scanning machine.
Contrast that with the tens of thousands of unvetted aliens whom Biden’s DHS is releasing into the United States each month and keep all of it in mind as I tell you that the odds that an illegal migrant will appear on the terrorist watchlist are 107,691 times greater than the chance that you will be a “commercial airline fatality”.
I should note that FAA’s tagline is “providing the safest, most efficient aerospace in the world”. Maybe we should put them in change of border security. Biden’s CBP plainly has the efficiency part down, but it’s skimpy on the safety aspect.
Warnings from the FBI Director. Three months ago, FBI Director Chris Wray warned Congress: “There is a particular network that has — some of the overseas facilitators of the smuggling network have — ISIS ties that we're very concerned about, and we've been spending enormous amount of effort with our partners investigating.” That’s now been shown to be dispositively true.
Those aliens were just part of what the FBI director described as “a wide array of very dangerous threats that emanate from the border”. We now know about 50 migrants ICE is trying to find who came via an “ISIS-affiliated human smuggling network”, and that’s bad enough. The rest of those threats should really keep you up at night, if you can do math and know how to read.