Terrorism-related encounters at Southwest border ports of entry are up about 21,600 percent from fiscal 2024 to fiscal 2026, and the jump tracks a change in who counts as terrorism-related.
Customs and Border Protection’s enforcement statistics list 52 terrorism-related encounters at Southwest ports in fiscal 2024. Through August of fiscal year 2026, the same Terrorist Screening Dataset table lists 11,283.
The Center for Immigration Studies, in an analysis published Monday, put the fiscal year 2026 port total at more than 11,250 for the first 11 months, and used the 11,283 figure for Office of Field Operations encounters at those ports.
Just the News reported the Center for Immigration Studies figures against just over 3,700 in fiscal 2025 and 103 in fiscal 2021.
Andrew Arthur, the Center for Immigration Studies fellow who wrote the report, said the rise is partly a border security metric. With illegal entries at historic lows, people with terrorism-related records are more likely to try the ports, where officers are posted to stop them.
The same report said encounters between the ports did not move with the port numbers. Border Patrol recorded 105 terrorism-related encounters on the Southwest border between ports of entry so far in fiscal 2026, a pace the Center for Immigration Studies put near 115, against 172 in fiscal 2023, 106 in fiscal 2024, and 98 in fiscal 2022.
Border Patrol is on pace for about 98,000 Southwest border apprehensions in fiscal 2026, Just the News reported, down about 95 percent from the 2.045 million recorded in fiscal 2023.
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Arthur also pointed to a definition change. On Jan. 20, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the designation of cartels and other entities as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists.
On Feb. 20, 2025, the State Department designated eight groups under both labels: Tren de Aragua, MS-13, the Sinaloa cartel, Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, Cártel del Noreste, La Nueva Familia Michoacana, the Gulf cartel, and Cárteles Unidos.
The Center for Immigration Studies wrote that many of the 11,283 port encounters may be known or suspected members or associates of those eight groups, and that port officers may have been stopping people in those organizations for years without recording them in this category.
That is the gap between the older number and the newer one.
A fiscal year 2024 count of 52 measured encounters that met the watchlist rules then in use. It did not measure entries from cartel and gang suspects who fell outside that definition and were not logged as related to terrorism at all.
Customs and Border Protection says the records “may include” hits from the Terrorist Screening Dataset, the watchlist kept by the FBI-led Terrorist Screening Center. Not every person on that list is a known or suspected terrorist, and Customs and Border Protection does not publish a final disposition for each encounter, the Center for Immigration Studies noted.
Between the ports, the newer labels did not produce a matching surge. Gang-affiliated apprehensions by Border Patrol on the Southwest border were 435 so far in fiscal 2026, on pace for about 475, below the 751, 639, and 523 recorded in fiscal 2022, 2023, and 2024.
Arthur’s report treated that split as evidence that tighter control between the ports pushed more of the traffic to the gates. He quoted former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott’s 2021 Senate testimony that plaza bosses working for transnational criminal organizations had used gaps in coverage to move criminals and potential terrorists through.
The fiscal 2026 port figure is a count of people stopped and identified under the post-designation rules. It is not a count of how many people with the same affiliations crossed in earlier years without a terrorism-related record being opened.
Fiscal year 2024’s 52 and fiscal year 2026’s 11,283 are both published Customs and Border Protection encounter totals. The percentage between them is an arithmetic result of those two cells. The change in who is classified as terrorism-related is the policy difference the Center for Immigration Studies attached to the increase.
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