According to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) source, five Syrian men were apprehended by Border Patrol officials as they crossed into Hidalgo, Texas, on Thursday, Fox News informed.
The migrants were apprehended by Rio Grande Valley sector officers and are among a range of nationalities arrested by the Border Patrol, many of whom are from nations distant from the United States’ land borders. In December there were around 178,840 arrests of migrants trying to cross the US border, after a year of more than 212,000 apprehensions during the peak of the surge.
The numbers have overloaded Border Patrol officials, causing a political nightmare for the Biden administration, which has been criticized for exacerbating the situation by repealing critical Trump-era border restrictions.
The large number of migrants heading north, as well as high estimates of those who have gotten past border officials, has fueled fears that terrorists and other criminals will attempt to enter the United States.
In the fiscal year 2021, there were 10,763 captures of migrants with criminal records, up from 2,438 in the fiscal year 2020 and 4,269 in the fiscal year 2019.
In the meantime, Republicans have been pressuring the Department of Homeland Security to make public the number of known or suspected terrorists who have been apprehended at the border.
Rodney Scott, a former Border Patrol Chief has regularly raised concerns about the amount of people in the Terrorist Screening Database crossing the border, warning fellow officers that the number was “higher than before.”
Syria has been listed as a state that sponsors terrorism, and it was one of the seven nations that were included in the Trump administration’s original travel ban in 2017 because of a perceived national security danger.
There was no indication that any of the five individuals apprehended on Thursday were linked to terrorism.
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