US on track to intercept 16 times as many suspected terrorists at border under Trump thanks to cartel designations
Border enforcement remains central to sovereignty debates as Americans demand action over rhetoric.
Sixteen times. Read that number twice. That's not a rounding error or a statistical quirk, that's a border that was functionally waving through people on a federal terrorist watch list for four years and nobody in the last administration wanted to talk about why.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
Federal law enforcement at the nation’s borders is on track to stop 16 times as many people on the FBI’s terrorist watch list this year than it did in any year during the Biden administration, according to a Washington Examiner investigation.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an agency under the Department of Homeland Security, is […]
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
Sixteen times. Read that number twice. That's not a rounding error or a statistical quirk, that's a border that was functionally waving through people on a federal terrorist watch list for four years and nobody in the last administration wanted to talk about why.
The cartel designations matter here in a way that's easy to skip past if you're not paying attention. Once you treat these smuggling networks as what they actually are, organized criminal enterprises with intelligence-sharing incentives to move anyone who can pay, you start getting better information from the people you catch. That's not a coincidence, that's a policy choice producing a measurable result. For years we were told the border was "secure" while known threats were slipping through in single digits a year and getting treated like a rounding error in a press briefing.
None of this means every single crossing under Biden involved a terrorist walking across the Rio Grande. It means the system for catching them was broken badly enough that we genuinely don't know how many got through uncounted, and that should bother everyone regardless of party. A watch list hit isn't a random encounter. It's a name that already triggered federal scrutiny somewhere else in the world.
Credit where it's due: this is what enforcement paired with actual intelligence-driven strategy looks like. It took cartel designations, not a slogan, to get here. The next time someone insists border security rhetoric was overblown, ask them to explain the multiplier.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.