On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom,” Tim Healy, who served as Director of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center Director under President Barack Obama, stated that the number of people on the terror watch list encountered on the border has caused him “sleepless nights” and the numbers are well above what concerned him when he ran the Screening Center.
Healy said, “[F]rom my perspective at the Terrorist Screening Center, the last three years, you’ve had 336 known or suspected terrorists arrested between entry points in the southern border. If you take the past four years, fiscal year ’17, ’18, ’19, and ’20, you had 14. So, that caused us, from my perspective, sleepless nights.”
He added, “[W]hen I was the director of the Terrorist Screening Center I had a program, I called it the gold program. And every day I was briefed on the encounters, we averaged 100 encounters a day, and I’d have them highlight in gold the ones that weren’t pending FBI cases. We’d average one or two a month. So, maximum, 12 to 24. And I was concerned about those 24, because those weren’t — those were encountered in the U.S., typically by law enforcement officers, unknown to the FBI. That’s somebody that’s on the watch list unknown to us. So, I was concerned about those 24 and made sure the FBI was working those cases. Now, there [are] 336. And then, plus the gotaways, so, it’s a significant problem.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett