Record Fentanyl, Terrorists in Border Crisis DHS Says “Criminal Actors May Continue to Exploit”

Created after 9/11 to prevent another terrorist attack, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) keeps slamming Americans with grim news involving its struggles to fulfill its critical mission. Days after the agency admitted it lost track of more than 177,000 illegal immigrants freed inside the United States, it released a Homeland Threat Assessment that reveals a record number of people with terrorist ties have tried to enter the country through the Mexican border, migrant encounters along the northern border have also reached an all-time high and that terrorists and criminal actors may continue to exploit the “elevated flow” and “increasingly complex security environment to enter the United States.” The situation will only get worse because the agency responsible for safeguarding the country expects “continued high numbers of migrant encounters over the next year,” according to the new assessment which was created with “insights” from the intelligence community.

DHS is a monstrous federal agency with 260,000 employees and a whopping $58 billion annual budget that may seem to many like sufficient resources to succeed in its key mission of countering terrorism and securing the nation’s borders. The new report documents that the agency has not only failed miserably to secure the famously porous southern border, but its northern counterpart as well. Through June illegal immigrant encounters along the northern border have reached record highs, the new report states, with over 132,000 migrants compared to 68,000 during the same amount of time last fiscal year. Among the most concerning information provided in the document is the increase in foreigners with terrorism connections trying to sneak into the country. As of July, approximately 160 individuals that appear on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) terrorist watchlist attempted to enter the U.S. via Mexico compared to 100 in all fiscal year 2022.

Adding to the problem, a spike in illegal immigrants from the eastern hemisphere—which includes countries with terrorist ties—has doubled from more than 110,000 in fiscal year 2022 to over 228,200 through June of this fiscal year which ends on September 30. “We expect the influx of these migrants will continue as they face poor economic, political, security, and climate conditions in their countries and use uneven visa policies across the globe to reach the United States,” the Homeland Threat Assessment says. Mexican drug cartels, known as Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCO), are also exploiting the U.S. security failures, referred to as a “complex environment” in the DHS report, to smuggle huge amounts of deadly drugs across the border. “TCOs almost certainly will continue to smuggle drugs into our country while also exploiting migrants for financial gain,” the agency writes, adding that “these criminal organizations likely will seek new technologies and develop novel techniques to improve their ability to evade our border security measures.”

DHS provides the country with a somber projection involving Mexican cartels, writing that it expects illegal drugs produced in Mexico and sold in the United States will continue to kill more Americans than any other threat. “During the past year, US-based traffickers have become more involved in the mixing and pressing of fentanyl, contributing to more lethal mixes of this already deadly drug,” the report states. It also reveals that fentanyl seizures along the southern border continue to increase throughout 2023 with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on track to seize a record amount of the deadly drug before the end of the fiscal year. “Transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) in Mexico, particularly the Sinaloa Cartel and the New Generation Jalisco Cartel, remain the primary smugglers of fentanyl and other drugs into the United States,” DHS assessment reveals. “These organizations continue to use bribery and violence to grow their smuggling and narcotics production operations in Mexico, and they rely on companies in China to purchase fentanyl precursor chemicals and pill pressing equipment.”

DHS does not discuss its strategy to combat the unprecedented border crisis, which it predicts will not improve anytime soon. “The complex border and immigration security challenges we have faced over the least year are likely to continue,” the agency writes in its latest assessment.