America's Talking - Former Border Chief: Mayorkas Underreported Gotaway Data in Senate Hearing

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

Former U.S. Customs and Border Protection Chief Mark Morgan estimates the number of people who entered the U.S. illegally and evaded capture in fiscal 2023 is closer to one million, much higher than the "over 600,000" that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told U.S. senators at a Tuesday hearing. Morgan told The Center Square Wednesday in response to questions about Mayorkas' testimony that official known gotaway data could hit one million in fiscal 2023, and the nearly 1.7 million gotaways since January 2021 is underreported by at least 20%. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulib, Vice President of News and Content at the Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire Service. Joining me again today is the CenterSquare's Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief, Casey Harper. How are you, Casey? Doing good, Dan. How are you? I am doing well, thank you. Casey, we are recording this on Friday, November 3rd.

What another week it was in our nation's capital. FBI director Christopher Wittray and separately, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified before Congress this week about threats to national security related to the ongoing Israeli war with the Hamas terrorist group and the ongoing border crisis here in the U.S. Ray told Congress that threats to the U.S. homeland from Islamic terrorist groups have risen to, quote, a whole new level. Mayorkas testified that in the past fiscal year, there were more than 600,000 known own, quote, gotaways who entered the U.S. without being apprehended just in the past year.

Marius misrepresented that number, but we'll get to that in the moment, Casey. What do you make of raised testimony? Yeah, this was a really interesting week on the topic of immigration at Capitol Hill. I mean, what happened is all these Republicans have been really crying at the top of their lungs that this immigration issue is a big problem. It's a national security concern. it's going to have huge negative impacts on the country. And they've been saying that really for years and nothing has been done. And that issue, though, has been getting increasing attention as the problem has gotten worse. And this idea of terrorists coming across the southern border and the northern border actually has gotten increasingly more valid and not just conspiratorial. There's more

data to back it up. And so these Republicans, you know, they bring, and not just Republicans, because some Democrats are concerned as well. But these lawmakers bring some of the guys who in D.C. are in charge of this issue, Mayorkis, Ray, and I said, hey, you guys are supposed to keep us safe. We have all these concerns. This is pretty bad, right? And Ray and Mayarchists are basically like, oh, yeah, this is bad. So, you know, it was not very comforting week.

He was like, wait a minute. So the guys who are part of the Biden administration who are on this issue just flat out admitted that, you know, the system is broken. Mayorchis called it, you know, part of an unbroken. in immigration system. Ray said the terrorist threat is very real. And I think that's really noteworthy because, you know, not that long ago, I think you would have been called some kind of conspiracy theorists, or maybe even a bigot, possibly, for saying that there could be terrorist elements coming across the border. I mean, remember, former president Donald Trump

infamously, you know, almost people thought he maybe sunk his campaign by saying that there were criminals and rapists coming across the southern border. It was really taboo thing to say then. and now, you know, we're hearing testimony in Congress from the head of the FBI, saying there's terrorists coming across the border. So we've come a long way on this issue, Dan. You said that he misrepresented the numbers, though, right? Mayorcas did based on the Center Square's own reporting. Mayoricus, which is his testimony was separate from FBI Director, Ray's.

He was asked if he knew how many Godaways. Godaways is the term that U.S. Customs and Border Protection uses to, identify individuals who illegally cross the border between ports of entry and go unapprehended, meaning they successfully get into the U.S. without being captured or arrested. There's surveillance at the border. The border protection uses like drones and other surveillance methods to, you know, to see significant portions of the border, but not all portions of the border. So some gotaways go undetected.

So Mayorkis was asked about that, and he said in the past fiscal year alone, the federal government's fiscal years from October 1st of one year to September 30th of the next year. You know, it's November 3rd now, so we're talking about the fiscal year that ended just September 30th. He said that more than over 600,000 godaways were detected. Our reporting, we have a border correspondent who's probably the best in the country covering the border situation, Bethany Blankly. She has sources inside Border Patrol, border agents who give her the internal information because gotaway data is not reported publicly. It's kept internally at DHS, but it's not reported publicly. Her sources have it at more than 800,000, but because there are folks who go undetecting, unknowns, that number is always almost certainly higher.

And her sources within Border Patrol put the number closer to a million. So, yes, a million is over 600,000, which is what Mayork is testified to. That's technically true, but it's a little bit misleading. We also know that in the last fiscal year alone, nearly 800 individuals on the terror watch list were apprehended at the border. What we don't know is how many of those gotaways, whether it's over 600,000, whether it's 800,000, whether it's a million, how many of those gotaways are on the terror watch list. So we have no idea how many suspected or known terrorists entered the country illegally or where they came from, whether they came from countries like Iran, China, anywhere in the Middle East. but we do know folks from those countries have been apprehended trying to get in the country,

so it only makes sense that some of these godaways anyway are from America's sworn enemies, from countries that are America's sworn enemies. Right. Yeah, I mean, that was the point I was going to raise is we don't know how many terrorists or suspected terrorists could be in that, you know, those millions of godaways. And you just talked about the numbers from this year, Dan, but if you just go back five, you know, five years, we've had millions of people. of people come into the country and millions of gotaways in that time, right? And in hundreds of

through the northern and southern border, hundreds of suspected terrorists, right? So if the percentage of suspected terrorists in the Godaways number is just about the same as the amount of terrorists that are caught coming in, then that's hundreds more. I mean, there would actually, you know, be hundreds more terrorists coming in if it just kind of stayed proportional. And so this is a really big problem. There's no solution for it right now in place. And as we talked about in the podcast before, President Biden has really paired back immigration and customs enforcement, their deportations. They pretty much are only deporting people, not exclusively, but they're focusing on people with really bad criminal records. And so there can be somebody suspected

terrorist who doesn't necessarily fit the profile, even for deportation. And even if they do, it's extremely hard to find them and track them down, of course, because it's a large country and you're looking for, you know, a handful of people in a large country. So that's, that is a big concern. And then we've also talked then because of this Israel-Hamas conflict, there's real concern about, okay, is this going to radicalize anyone? You know, we know, we were told over and over again how our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan in the war was actually radicalizing young men who maybe otherwise would have been peaceful to attack America because, you know, somehow our actions had just flipped a switch in their brain and they, it would become radicalized. And so could the same

thing be happening with this Israel Hamas conflict with the war there? We know that Hezbollah and Hamas really have some kind of presence in Mexico. So those are other things to be thinking about. And then the other thing is even if someone is not on the suspected terror watch list, we still don't really know who they are. I mean, it's pretty hard, you know, it's kind of a high bar to get on a list. You could easily be someone with malintent or someone who's just been radicalized by the internet. We've seen that too, Dan, where someone is just watching videos consuming online content and they become radicalized without any real preexisting relationship. So when you just have so many millions of people coming in, there's really no way to know what their intents are

and what the effects will be. Just going back to Ray's testimony, Casey, we don't have a whole lot of time left, but I just want to quote from his testimony, quote, in just the past few weeks, multiple foreign terrorist organizations have called for attacks against Americans and the West. Al-Qaeda issued the most specific call to attack the United States in the last five years. ISIS urged his followers to target Jewish communities in the United States and Europe. Hezbollah has publicly expressed its support from Hamas and threatened to attack U.S. interests in the Middle East. we've seen an increase on U.S. military bases overseas carried out by militia groups backed by Iran.

So this threat is real. Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody just this week issued a warning to Floridians to be on the alert that this threat is very real. So the mainstream media is not really talking about this, certainly not reporting on it as we are. But this, God forbid, hopefully this never, ever happens and we are wrong or our concerns are inflated. But it's a real risk and Americans should be wary. Final thoughts. Yeah, I mean, it's a real thing. The one thing I'll add is something I wrote about this week, which is just reporting an analysis of the aftermath of Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. It's very chaotic. You know, U.S. troops died. And as a result, the country fell into the hands of the Taliban and into chaos. And as a result of that, we actually brought about 80,000

Afghan evacuees into the U.S. But I've been, you know, looking at this issue and it turns out we really did not do enough to really vet all these vacuies, according to the federal watchdog who oversaw the process. You know, I talked to the group, the federal group that did the vetting, and they basically said they did their best. They put everyone through steps. But the federal watchdog said they didn't have enough information to really know enough about everything. everyone to properly vet them. So, you know, across multiple angles, we're just bringing a lot of people in that are not vetted. And these new concerns, these new threats are raising, you know, questions about really the safety side of this issue. That's encouraging, Casey. Thanks for that.

That's what I do, Dan. Thank you for your reporting on this. Listeners can keep up with this story and more at the center square.com. For Casey Harper, I'm Dan McCaleb. Please subscribe. Thank you for listening. Thank you.