Former Acting ICE Director Tom Homan expressed fear that the Biden administration's border policies have left the United States vulnerable to terrorism after Hamas' deadly assault on Israel.
"I've never been more concerned about the safety and security of this nation than I am right now," Homan told "FOX & Friends First" Thursday.
"I'm telling you, something's coming. I don't know how many terrorists have crossed the border, but someday we're going to find out and it's going to be a bad day for America."
Thousands of "special interest aliens" from numerous countries, including the Middle East, have been arrested by Border Patrol agents while attempting to cross the U.S. southern border illegally over the last two years, according to internal Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data leaked to FOX News.
"Special interest aliens" are people from countries identified by the U.S. government as having conditions that promote or protect terrorism or potentially pose some sort of national security threat to the U.S.
That data, confirmed by multiple CBP sources and reflects apprehensions between ports of entry between October 2021 and October 2023, shows that agents encountered 6,386 nationals from Afghanistan in that period as well as 3,153 from Egypt, 659 from Iran and 538 from Syria.
"I said for two years, my biggest concern on our southern border is terrorism because the Border Patrol rescued people from 171 different countries," Homan said. "This is the biggest national security issue facing this country.
"The American people need to understand we can't really properly vet all these people because some of these countries they come from," Homan said.
"There are no records. So unless they ran across them on a battlefield, unless there's some sort of technology in that country. A lot of these people from these countries that sponsor terror, we don't know who the hell they are."
The numbers do not include encounters by CBP’s Office of Field Operations at ports of entry. It also does not include the numbers who have snuck past agents without detection -- sources say there have been over 1.5 million such "gotaways" during the Biden administration.
Meanwhile, fiscal year 2023 broke the record for encounters on the FBI terror watch list with 151 people encountered at the southern border between ports of entry, higher than the previous six years combined.
The Hamas terror attacks, launched across the border from Gaza into Israel, are prompting warnings from immigration experts surrounding U.S. national security.
"Absolutely," Lora Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital this week when asked if the Hamas attack on Israel serves as a warning that the southern border with Mexico is not secure and vulnerable to national security threats.
"Particularly the 1.7 million known ‘gotaways,' those who evaded the Border Patrol because they didn't want to be fingerprinted because they're either known or suspected terrorists themselves, convicted aggravated felons, smuggling drugs or some combination thereof.
Homan added that Hamas' ability to invade Israel's sophisticated border barrier shows the U.S. is an easy target.
"If they can do that through the most sophisticated system, what do you think that means? What does it say about the United States when we have 70 to 90% of agents off the line? And we got 1.8 million gotaways. If they can penetrate Israel, they will have no problem getting into the United States.
"People don't want to be fingerprinted. People don't want to go through vetting procedures. This should scare the hell out of every American."
Fox News' Adam Shaw, Bill Melugin, Griff Jenkins and Andrew Mark Miller contributed to this report.
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