Here’s a statistic nobody in the media and not even the president himself has mentioned: In the first 11 months of FY 2026, immigration officers at CBP’s Office of Field Operations (OFO) have had more than 11,250 “terrorism-related encounters ... of all nationalities” — aliens and U.S. citizens — at the Southwest border ports of entry. That’s more than twice as many as in FY 2025 (just over 3,700), but more importantly, 100-plus times the Biden-era record (in FY 2021, 103). Counterintuitively, in the enforcement world more encounters of this sort are a good thing because more potential “bad guys” are getting caught. If you want to understand why “the most secure border” in history is so crucial to our national security, look no further.
The Alphabet Soup that Creates the Naughty “Watchlist”
Here’s what that statistic means, and what it might not mean.
As the CBP website explains, the terrorism-related records in question “may include records from the U.S. government’s Terrorist Screening Dataset” (TSDS), also known as the “Terrorist Watchlist” or simply “the Watchlist”.
The Watchlist is maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), a “a federal multi-agency center” created in the wake of September 11th by President George W. Bush in 2003. The TSC is administered by the FBI in coordination with DHS, DOJ, the Department of State (DOS), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
The Bush administration created the TSC to coordinate the terrorism-related intelligence information each of those federal agencies has compiled because, not surprisingly, each jealously guards its intelligence to ensure potential threats don’t know the U.S. government is on to them.
And note that not everybody on the Watchlist is a “known or suspected terrorist” (KST), but many are.
When an agency believes it has identified a KST “with a nexus to international terrorism”, it “nominates” that individual and sends its information to the National Counterterrorism Center (“NCTC”, which is part of ODNI) to be included on the Watchlist or on NCTC’s Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE).
As the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) explains:
TIDE is the U.S. government's central repository of information (both classified and unclassified) on international terrorist identities. As of October 2020, TIDE contained about 2.5 million identities. U.S. persons (both citizens and lawful permanent residents) account for less than 1% of the total. TSC does not publish the number of Watchlist identities, although media reports indicate that approximately 2 million KSTs were on the Watchlist at the end of [calendar year] 2023.
NCTC and/or FBI analysts at the TSC vet the agency nominations it receives and TSC reviews them “to confirm that they meet the minimum identifying and derogatory criteria for inclusion” in TSDS and TIDE.
CBP makes clear that not all of its terrorist-related hits come from TSDS, only that some of the information OFO relied upon during those terrorism-related encounters “may include” TSDS records.
CBP officers at the ports access that TSDS data through TECS, an acronym for the “Treasury Enforcement Communications System” when it was launched in 1970 by the U.S. Customs Service but now “not an acronym” since CBP assumed some former Customs duties when DHS was created and the system was updated.
The purpose of TECS is:
to track individuals who have violated or are suspected of violating a law or regulation that is enforced or administered by CBP, to provide a record of any inspections conducted at the border by CBP, to determine admissibility into the United States, and to record information regarding individuals, firms, and organizations to whom DHS/CBP has issued detentions and warnings.
Put that all together and the likely conclusion is that TECS contains TSDS and TIDE information and also some of CBP’s and/or DHS’s own intelligence that either wasn’t nominated for TIDE or TSDS or that was nominated and didn’t make TSC cut.
That doesn’t make that intelligence any less useful, because TECS is more of a “heads up” to CBP officers and Border Patrol agents than a final disposition. What officers and agents do with that intelligence depends on whether the subject of the hit is inadmissible and/or subject to prosecution, but the CBP website does not include final dispositions for those encounters.
Trump II Expands the Definition of “Foreign Terrorist Organizations”
In addition, it’s not a complete surprise that OFO’s “terrorism-related encounters” have increased of late, because recent administrative actions have expanded the number of “terrorists” for CBP officers at the port to encounter.
On his first day back in January 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order (EO) 14157, “Designating Cartels and Other Organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists”.
As I explained shortly after that EO was announced, the phrases “foreign terrorist organization” (FTO) and “specially designated global terrorists” (SDGT) are terms of art, with federal statutes providing processes by which organizations can be designated as such.
FTO is defined in section 219 of the INA, and to be designated as an FTO, an organization must: (1) be a foreign organization; (2) engage in “terrorist activity” as defined in the section 212(a)(3)(B) terrorist grounds of inadmissibility in the INA or “terrorism” as defined for State Department reporting purposes in 22 U.S.C. § 2656f(d)(2); and (3) that terrorism or terrorist activity must threaten the security of the United States or its nationals.
SGDT designations, on the other hand, originate with EO 13224, which was issued by President George W. Bush shortly after the September 11th attacks under his authority in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (“IEEPA”, 50 U.S.C. § 1701 et seq.).
The secretary of State, in consultation with DHS and DOJ, can designate an individual or group as an SGDT based on various criteria, most prominently that such entities “have committed, or pose a significant risk of committing, acts of terrorism that threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security, foreign policy, or economy” of the United States.
Thereafter, on February 20, 2025, DOS designated eight “international cartels” — Tren de Aragua (TdA), Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), Cártel de Sinaloa, Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), Cártel del Noreste (“CDN”, formerly “Los Zetas”), La Nueva Familia Michoacana (LNFM), Cártel de Golfo (CDG), and Cárteles Unidos (CU) — as FTOs and SGDTs.
Most of those organizations should sound familiar, but briefly: TdA is a well-organized criminal racket that started in Venezuela and expanded throughout Latin America and then into the United States under the last administration; MS-13 began in Los Angeles in the 1980s and has grown to become “perhaps the most notorious street gang in the Western Hemisphere”; and Sinaloa, CJNG, CDN, LNFM, CDG, and CU are Mexican-based drug cartels that have branched out to other countries and other illicit activities.
All have left a trail of bodies in their wake, and in the case of each new FTO/SGDT, many of those deaths have occurred in this country.
It’s possible, if not probable, that many of the 11,283 OFO TSDS encounters at the Southwest ports were of known or suspected members or associates of one or more of those eight FTOs and SGDTs, but even if all of them are, this country is better off because they were stopped and identified before they came in.
No Similar Rise in Border Patrol Gang and TSDS Encounters
That said, OFO hasn’t traditionally tracked encounters with members of any transnational gang or cartel, but its sister CBP agency Border Patrol has reported both “Gang Affiliated Enforcement” apprehensions (including of TdA and MS-13 members and affiliates) and its own TSDS encounters for years.
If the massive increase in OFO stops at the Southwest border ports was solely attributable to DOS’s new FTO/SGDT designations, logically there would be a similar rise in both Border Patrol’s gang apprehensions and its “Terrorism-Related encounters” this fiscal year.
Except, that hasn’t happened, and in some of those categories, the exact opposite has occurred.
Border Patrol’s Southwest border gang apprehensions thus far in FY 2026 (435 and on track for 475) lag its totals for FY 2022 (751), FY 2023 (639), and FY 2024 (523) — that is the last three full fiscal years of the Biden administration — and its 105 TSDS encounters at the Southwest border (on track for 115) are roughly equivalent to its efforts in FY 2022 (98) and FY 2024 (106) and far below FY 2023 (172).
Then Why the Increase?
There are two possible reasons why CBP’s terrorism-related encounters at the Southwest border ports have shot up under Trump II while Border Patrol’s terrorism-related apprehensions between those ports have fallen, remained static, or risen only modestly during the same period.
The first is that the increase in “Terrorism-related encounters” at the ports involve known and suspected members and associates of cartels and gangs that are newly designated by DOS as FTOs and SDGTs, and that OFO officers have been stopping such people for years but never reporting them.
That’s possible, and perhaps likely to a degree, but it almost definitely does not tell the whole story.
Rather, when considering the situation at the Southwest border over the past five years in toto, a different explanation appears more likely: Increased border security has bred even greater border security. Here’s why.
Border Patrol apprehensions at the Southwest border reached previously inconceivable heights under the Biden administration, largely due to that administration’s “catch and release” policies for illegal migrants, which simply encouraged even more illicit migration in a vicious circle of catches and releases.
That put a significant strain on Border Patrol, and consequently, as then-former Border Patrol Chief (and now CBP Commissioner) Rodney Scott explained to the Senate in September 2021, illegal entries started being:
scripted and controlled by Plaza Bosses that work directly for the transnational criminal organizations (TCO) to create controllable gaps in border security. These gaps are then exploited to easily smuggle contraband, criminals, or even potential terrorists into the U.S. at will. Even when [Border Patrol] detects the illegal entry, agents are spread so thin that they often lack the capability to make a timely interdiction.
In other words, the insecure Biden border facilitated the illegal entry of criminals and “potential terrorists” past overwhelmed agents and into the U.S. interior without them ever being encountered by CBP.
In fact, the House Judiciary Committee has reported that there were two million such “got-aways”, aliens “who avoided apprehension entirely” under Biden, and as one of Scott’s successors, then-Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens, told CBS News in March 2024:
what's keeping me up at night is the ... known got-aways. ... Why are they risking their lives and crossing in areas where we can't get to? Why are they hiding? What do they have to hide? What are they bringing in? What is their intent? Where are they coming from? We simply don't know the answers to those questions.
Those things for us are what represent the threat to our communities. [Emphasis added.]
Simply put, under Biden it was easier and safer for cartel and gang members and potential terrorists to skip the ports of entry entirely on their way to the United States, and to simply cross the border illegally through the “controllable gaps” Scott described.
Now-Commissioner Scott and “Border Czar” Tom Homan have flipped that script, with the border secure and Border Patrol apprehensions — the heuristic for attempted illegal entries — at historic lows.
Border Patrol is on pace to make roughly 98,000 Southwest border apprehensions by the end of FY 2026, down 95 percent from FY 2023 (2.045 million Southwest border apprehensions), and while there are surely still got-aways (the Southwest border is 1,954 miles long, open all night, and impossible to completely seal), they are likely a small fraction of what they were.
Attempting to enter the United States through a port of entry if you are a criminal or a potential terrorist is always fraught with the risk of encounter, but compared to the border security Scott and Homan have created, it’s now a much safer bet than crossing the Rio Grande or through the Sonoran Desert illegally.
But if they do go that port route, criminals and potential terrorists will find Southwest border ports that are much more secure than they were under Biden as well.
If current trends hold, CBP officers in OFO will have recorded just over 41,725 alien encounters at the Southwest ports in FY 2026, 90 percent fewer than in FY 2023 (nearly 430,000), and the reason why goes back to Biden-era policies, as well.
To hide the burgeoning numbers of illegal crossings, the last administration announced in January 2023 that it would begin allowing would-be illegal migrants without documents and with no right to be admitted to preschedule their illegal entries by making appointments at the Southwest border ports — ostensibly to offer “protection claims” — using the CBP One app.
Months later 1,450 aliens per day were scheduling appointments at eight major Southwest border ports (Brownsville, El Paso, Eagle Pass, Hidalgo, and Laredo, all in Texas; Calexico and San Ysidro in California; and Nogales, Ariz.) under what I dubbed the “CBP One app interview scheme”.
In August 2024, the DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) concluded “CBP Did Not Thoroughly Plan for CBP One Risks”, noting in particular that “security vulnerabilities within the CBP One application and its supporting infrastructure operating systems could compromise the security of CBP One information”.
Regardless, CBP officers had to subject CBP One aliens to both primary inspection (at the port kiosk) and secondary inspection (in a back office), which had to have placed massive strain on the CBP officers in those eight ports.
Trump ended the CBP One app interview scheme almost immediately, and now all those CBP officers are back “on the line” at their ports inspecting applicants for admission — and undoubtedly finding criminals and other ne’er-do-wells they would have missed when they were busy processing all of those illegal CBP One migrants.
Border Security Breeds Border Security
To underscore how impressive (or scary, depending on your view) OFO’s terrorism-related encounters in FY 2026 have been, consider that CBP officers at the Southwest border ports have only recorded 38,250 total alien encounters this fiscal year through the end of August at the same time it’s encountered nearly 11,500 individuals “with terrorism-related records”.
It’s possible that all the individuals in that latter group are aliens, in which case 30 percent of all CBP Southwest port encounters have involved an alien with a terrorism-related record.
CBP, however, makes clear that the terrorism-related encounters are of “all nationalities”, and include U.S. citizens. It would be good to know how many U.S. citizens are on that list, and also what the agency did with them after they were stopped. Regardless, it’s a positive development that someone’s keeping track of who’s coming in.
Some may look at the massive increase in CBP’s Southwest port encounters of individuals with terrorism-related records and conclude the nation is under an unprecedented terrorism threat, and with what’s happening in the Middle East, there may be truth to that — but it’s likely just a footnote in a much more important story.
The most logical conclusions to draw from the massive rise in CBP’s Southwest port of entry encounters of those with terrorism-related records is: (1) with the border secure, bad actors are choosing to try their luck at the ports instead of entering illegally; and (2) port officers are now better positioned to stop them.
The White House talks a lot about how we now have “The Most Secure Border in the History of This Nation”. Maybe it’s time for the president to mention the key metric that underscores how important that “secure border” is to the safety of the American people.