According to a report from the United States House Judiciary Committee, 99 noncitizens have been put on the “terrorist watchlist.” Is this true?
Claudia Tenney, a member of the US House of Representatives, recently claimed that people on the watchlist were “let loose” in the US. She made the claim in opposition to the state’s law that allows all immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses in New York.
On Fox News, the Republican representative said, “New York is one of the worst.” “We had almost 99 people I think, or 100 people, on the terror watchlist just let loose. That’s the ones we know of”.
Tenney also asserted that those who appear on the list can obtain licenses because their congressional district includes more than a dozen counties along the shores of Lake Ontario, which shares borders with Canada.
We will focus on her claim that 99 or 100 immigrants who appear on the “terror watchlist” were “let loose”.
What does US CBP data show?
US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers encounter citizens and noncitizens at the border who have “terrorism-related” records, including those from the government’s Terrorist Screening Dataset. Although critics claim the list is too broad, with over two million names, this list contains names of individuals who are known or suspected to be related to “terrorism.” It contains both people who are suspicious and those who are connected to them.
Noncitizens who attempt to cross the border at land ports of entry and have a “terrorism” record are most frequently found repatriated or removed from their home countries, according to CBP. Additionally, they might be given to a different government agency to carry out an enforcement order.
These noncitizens are most frequently detained, removed, or turned over to another government agency for resumption and law enforcement action, as appropriate, if CBP officers encounter them after they enter the country without being screened.
Data from fiscal year 2024, which ended on September 30, shows that there were 410 encounters with all people who matched in ‘ terrorism ‘ records, which could include US citizens, at ports of entry.
“Encounters” could represent multiple attempts by the same person to cross the border. Only a small portion of the total number of border border enforcement encounters that year. Since 2022, most of these encounters occurred at the US-Canada border. In 2024, 358 of these encounters occurred at the northern border and 52 at the southwest border.
Additionally, the organization tracks interactions between noncitizens whose histories of “terrorism” are comparable. There are far fewer of these, just 106 in the year that ended September 30, with 103 of those at the southwest border, and 13 from October 1 to January, all at the southwest border.
We contacted Tenney’s office to get evidence for her claim, but received no , response.
What’s the basis for Tenney’s claims?
It is likely that Tenney’s source is a report released in August from the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio. The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) cited “information provided” in the report. However, it did not supply any other corroboration or details. It states at least 99 noncitizens who were matches on the “terrorist watchlist” were released into the US from 2021 to 2023.
DHS held a further 34 immigrants from the list. The language in the report suggests that immigration officials were aware that the list’s noncitizens were present when it was released. According to the report, 250 noncitizens who attempted to cross the southern border were identified as being on the list and who made up the majority of the list. At the southern border, according to CBP statistics, 250 people were encountered with those on the watchlist between 2021 and 2023. According to those statistics, there might be multiple encounters with the same person.
Other instances, as reported in the report, include the arrests of eight Tajik nationals with potential ties to the ISIL (ISIS) organization who entered the country and were later detained, were noted. Their possible “terror” ties were not known when they crossed the border, according to NBC News.
A similar case involved an unidentified Uzbek man who stayed for two years. Migrants whose names were initially on the watchlist were not included in the other examples are there.
Additionally, according to the report, immigration judges granted bonds to 27 immigrants who crossed the border between 2021 and 2023 but were on a “terrorist watchlist.” However, the judges might not have known about the migrants ‘ status on the list, the report states.
Asylum was granted to four more people on the list. According to government documents that a reporter obtained, a Venezuelan citizen who had been identified as being on the watchlist was allowed into the US due to concerns about COVID-19 in detention facilities.
CBP referred our questions about the report’s veracity to DHS, which did not respond to our inquiries.
What is the truth behind the claims that Americans were released from a “terror watchlist”?
Migrants with possible “terror” ties have been in the news recently.
At least two more reported cases have been reported in which migrants who were not on the “terrorist watchlist” were detained. An Afghan migrant who was on the watchlist and released was reported by NBC News in April. He was arrested a year later in Texas, hours after the NBC report. Border agents initially did not have enough information to support his inclusion on the list, according to the network.
A migrant whose name did not match a name on the watchlist was revealed in a 2024 article from The Daily Caller. He was arrested nearly a year later, two days after authorities confirmed his ties to a Somali “terrorist” group.
A counterterrorism expert told PolitiFact that there is no credible reporting that any kind of state, local, or federal “catch and release” programme involving known or suspected “terrorists”, known as KSTs, exists.
“In contrast, if a KST is apprehended at the border, or elsewhere, they will be either prosecuted]if part of a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization] or removed from the country and sent to their country of origin”, said Jason M Blazakis, director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.
Blazakis questioned the House Judiciary Committee report’s accuracy, stating that it lacks specifics.
The “terrorist watchlist” is broad, and can include many people who do not pose an immediate threat, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t people on that list who “pose a serious threat to the United States,” Reichlin-Melnick said. However, there are more than ten years’ worth of complaints about the list’s overuse and size.
Releasing people known to be on the “terrorist watchlist” is not the policy of CBP. According to Taylor, there have been instances of people who were deported into the US who were listed. People whose immigration status on the list was unknown to them when they crossed the border were a large part of these cases.
