Federal law enforcement at the nation’s borders is on track to stop nearly 20 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 on track to encounter more than 12,000 known or suspected terrorists along the border with Canada and Mexico, including at ports of entry where vehicles cross and between the ports where migrants attempt to enter illegally.
Current and former government officials, as well as immigration analysts, do not believe this phenomenon is the result of an increased threat from terrorist groups, such as the Islamic State or al Qaeda. Rather, they agreed that President Donald Trump’s classification of at least 16 Western Hemisphere cartels and gangs as foreign terrorist organizations in his second term is the reason the number of potential terrorists caught at the border has surged over the past year and a half.
DHS agreed with the views of those experts.
“By properly identifying these groups as foreign terrorist organizations and having operational control of the border, CBP has recorded a significant increase in terrorism-related encounters at the border,” a DHS spokesperson wrote in an email.
What the data show
Government data show CBP agents between the ports and officers at the ports encountered 736 people listed in the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database in 2023, the highest annual number since 2019. Earlier data were not available, although two current officials who spoke with the Washington Examiner on the condition of anonymity were not aware of a previous year when that figure would have been higher.
CBP’s “Terrorist Screening Data Set Encounters” chart shows that the number of known and suspected terrorists being encountered at the border began to rise in fiscal 2025, when Trump took office again.
As more groups were added to the FBI list, CBP began encountering significantly more terrorist suspects at the border, including over 4,000 in fiscal 2025, which ended in September 2025.
That combined figure — 8,195 — represents the first eight months of fiscal 2026. At this rate, CBP would finish with 12,292 arrests by Sept. 30, which is 16 times higher than the record-setting 736 terrorist suspects nabbed in 2023.
Historically, total terrorist suspects encountered at the northern and southern borders have ranged between 150 and 750, with the large majority stopped at the Canadian ports of entry. However, this most recent uptick has favored the Mexican border.
Between October 2025 and May 2026, CBP encountered 8,121 terrorist suspects at ports at both borders, in addition to 74 people who tried to enter the United States between ports.
Trump’s designation of terrorist organizations
Five immigration analysts and former senior CBP officials individually touted Trump’s surge in terrorist organization designations as the primary reason for the uptick.
Theresa Cardinal Brown, a tenured immigration policy analyst and former CBP senior official, told the Washington Examiner that Trump made 10 such designations during his first term, while former President Joe Biden made five, and former President Barack Obama made 22 across his two terms.
Trump has designated 30 organizations as terrorist groups, automatically placing members of those groups and people affiliated with members on the FBI’s terrorist list. The watch list also includes second- and third-degree connections to individuals believed to be suspected or known terrorists, such as family members, roommates, and close friends.
“President Trump designated key cartels and transnational criminal groups as foreign terrorist threats — recognizing their national-security danger and threat to the American Homeland,” a DHS spokesperson said. “These designations target notorious organizations such as the Cártel de Sinaloa, CJNG, and MS-13, and Tren de Aragua. These cartels and gangs rape, maim, murder, and smuggle drugs into American communities.”
Not all ‘terrorist’ groups are the same
Many of Trump’s designations this time around included groups based in the Western Hemisphere as opposed to what Americans historically have viewed as terrorist groups, such as al Qaeda and ISIS out of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Lawmakers have warned in the 25 years since the 9/11 terrorist attack that terrorists who wish to harm the U.S. could sneak into the country at the southern border, but Brown noted that the cartels and gangs in Latin America that have long crossed the border have a different intent.
“When you start talking about a high number of people on the [Terrorist Screening Database] being encountered, what tends to happen is people assume that means, ‘Oh my god, there’s a lot of terrorists trying to cross in,’” said Brown, nonresident immigration law and policy fellow at Cornell Law School and president and CEO of Cardinal North Strategies. “I don’t think that is the right interpretation of these numbers. I think these are people who are from newly designated organizations, who didn’t know that they have now been designated and therefore their names are on a watch list and showed up at a port of entry and went, ‘Oh my goodness.’”
Todd Bensman, who recently left his post at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s National Counterterrorism Center, agreed with Brown’s assessment.
“The percentage of Islamic terrorists of the traditional sort we’ve worried about since 9/11 is very small in this total. That’s because Mexican/South American gangsters pose a very different more defused indirect kind of threat to the American general public while Islamist terrorists pose a very specific direct threat,” Bensman wrote in an email. “Cartels and gangs import poisonous drugs and break a lot of violent crime laws, most often against one another is the typical model. By contrast, Islamists often want to kill large numbers of Americans wherever they can at random and so are naturally more feared.”
Bensman urged the Trump administration to release a breakdown of the suspected terrorist statistics to show how many were from gangs and cartels in the Western Hemisphere versus terrorist groups overseas that wish to carry out targeted attacks on Americans.
“Otherwise, the reporting is not very meaningful,” said Bensman, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center.
Other reasons for the uptick
A former senior CBP official said in a phone call on Tuesday that Border Patrol has been able to keep large numbers of agents on the border, not transporting immigrants or watching people in detention, because general illegal crossings have declined from the historic highs seen during the Biden administration. The result, he said, would likely be that people who do not want to get caught would attempt to cross between the ports, where Border Patrol is now carefully watching the horizon.
Simon Hankinson, senior research fellow at Heritage’s Border Security and Immigration Center, pointed to the terrorist organization designations and improved state of border security as the reason the numbers have risen under Trump.
“Another reason could be the tightening of the border itself, meaning fewer gotaways, who would be more likely hiding something including cartel or gang history or connections,” Hankinson wrote in an email.
David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, said related CBP data do not show an uptick in the number of criminal arrests.
“I just see this as an accounting issue, not something new that should alarm anyone,” Bier wrote in an email. “It is worth-noting that the [FBI terrorist watch list] for ports of entry include U.S. citizens, so it’s not even a reflection of ‘migration’ at all.”
Putting a political spin on the data
Although the terrorist data make sense in the context of the new cartel designations, they still may not be something the Trump administration wants to tout as evidence of bolstering border security.
Andrew Meehan, a former DHS official, said these types of data points are often a “political trap” because they can be used to validate competing narratives.
“Encounter data reflects one aspect of CBP’s operational capability, not the entirety of border security,” Meehan wrote in an email. “The administration’s challenge is that it has celebrated historically low illegal crossings as evidence of effective policy. Those messages create tension: if the border is secure, highlighting significant watchlist encounters can reinforce a perception of continued vulnerability, even though those encounters also demonstrate CBP’s ability to identify and stop individuals of concern.”
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To Meehan’s point, Brown said an increase in general illegal immigrant arrests by Border Patrol or suspected terrorists at the border could very well be viewed as a good outcome.
“When the numbers of encounters go up, everyone’s like, ‘Oh my God. It’s evidence of more people crossing,’” Brown said. “No, it’s evidence we’re catching people. I think it is far more likely we are catching more of those people because of the increased designations.”