Some noncitizens on terror watch list were released into U.S., but how many is not clear

Rep. Claudia Tenney recently claimed that people on the terror watch list have been "let loose" in the United States. Her claim came as part of her argument against New York state’s law that grants driver’s licenses to New Yorkers regardless of their immigration status. 

"New York is one of the worst," Tenney said on Fox News. "We had almost 99 people I think, or 100 people, on the terror watch list just let loose. That’s the ones we know of." 

Tenney, a Republican whose congressional district snakes across more than a dozen counties along the shores of Lake Ontario, also claimed that people who appear on the list can get licenses. 

We will focus on her claim that 99 or 100 immigrants who appear on the terror watch list were "let loose." 

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers encounter citizens and noncitizens at the border who have terrorism-related records, including those from the government’s Terrorist Screening Dataset. This list contains names of people who are known or suspected to have ties to terrorism, though critics say the list is overly broad, containing 2 million names. The list contains not just suspicious people, but people connected to them.  

Noncitizens who try to cross the border at land ports of entry and match a terrorism record "are most commonly found inadmissible to our country and immediately repatriated or removed," according to CBP. They could also be turned over to another government agency for enforcement action. If CBP officers encounter them after they have entered the country without being screened, "these noncitizens are most commonly detained and removed or turned over to another government agency for subsequent detention and law enforcement action, as appropriate."  

Data from fiscal year 2024, which ended Sept. 30, shows that there were 410 encounters with all people who matched in terrorism records, which could include U.S. citizens, at ports of entry. "Encounters" could represent multiple tries by the same person to cross the border. This represents a small fraction of the 2.9 million total enforcement encounters at the border that year. Since 2022, most of these encounters occurred at the U.S.-Canada border. In 2024, 358 of these encounters occurred at the northern border, and 52 at the southwest border. 

The agency also tracks encounters between ports of entry of noncitizens who match a terrorism record. There are far fewer of these, just 106 in the year that ended Sept. 30, with 103 of those at the southwest border, and 13 from Oct. 1 to January, all at the southwest border.     

We contacted Tenney’s office to get evidence for her claim, but received no response. 

It’s likely that Tenney’s source is a report released in August from the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. The report cited "information provided" by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. But it did not supply any other corroboration or details. It states at least 99 noncitizens who were matches on the terror watch list were released into the United States from 2021 to 2023. 

An additional 34 immigrants from the list were in DHS custody. The report uses language to suggest that immigration authorities knew at the time of release that the noncitizens were on the list. The report states the 99 came from a pool of 250 noncitizens who tried to cross at the southern border and who were identified as being on the list. CBP statistics show 250 encounters with people on the watch list during the years 2021 through 2023 at the southern border. There could be multiple encounters with the same person in those statistics.  

The report notes other instances in which people on the list crossed undetected and were subsequently arrested, including the case of eight Tajik nationals with potential Islamic State group ties who entered the country and were arrested in June. Their possible terror ties were not known when they crossed the border, according to NBC News.

A similar case involved an Uzbek man who stayed for two years without detection. Other examples involve migrants whose place on the watch list was initially unverified. 

The report also claims that immigration judges granted bond to 27 migrants who appeared on a terror watch list but came over the border between ports of entry from 2021 to 2023. But the judges might not have known about the migrants’ status on the list, the report states. Four others on the list were granted asylum. A Venezuelan citizen who was known by authorities to appear on the watch list was released into the United States over concerns about COVID-19 in detention facilities, according to government documents a reporter obtained. 

Border Patrol referred our questions about the report’s veracity to DHS, which did not respond to our inquiries. 

Migrants with possible terror ties have been in the news recently. 

There have also been at least two other reported cases where migrants who should have been detained because they were on the terror watch list but were not. NBC News reported in April about an Afghan migrant who was on the terror watch list and released. He was arrested a year later in Texas, hours after the NBC report. The man was not held initially because border agents did not have enough information to corroborate his place on the list, the network reported. The Daily Caller reported in 2024 about the release of a migrant whose name did not match a name on the watch list. He was arrested nearly a year later, two days after authorities confirmed his ties to a Somali terrorist group. 

A counterterrorism expert told PolitiFact that there is no credible reporting that any kind of state, local, or federal "catch and release" program involving known or suspected terrorists, known as KSTs, exists. 

"In contrast, if a KST is apprehended at the border, or elsewhere, they will be either prosecuted (if part of a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization) or removed from the country and sent to their country of origin," said Jason M. Blazakis, director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. 

Blazakis questioned the House Judiciary Committee report’s accuracy, stating that it lacks specifics. 

The terror watch list is broad, and can include many people who do not pose an immediate threat, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. 

"That is not to say that there are not people on that list who do pose a serious threat to the United States," Reichlin-Melnick said. "But complaints about the list being too large and overinclusive date back more than a decade."

Tenney claimed that noncitizens who appear on the terror watch list are "let loose" into the United States. 

Releasing people known to be on the terror watch list is not the policy of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Tenney is correct, that there are known cases of people who appear on the list who were released into the United States. These cases largely involved people whose status on the list was not known to immigration authorities at the time they crossed the border. The House Judiciary Committee released a report stating that there had been 99 noncitizens who appeared on the watch list who were released into the United States, and suggested that immigration authorities knew of their status at that time. The report cited "information provided" by DHS, but DHS has not confirmed the report. Because of this uncertainty, we are not rating this claim on our Truth-O-Meter.