FBI Director Wray warns of ‘wide array’ of dangerous threats stemming from border

FBI Director Christopher Wray testified on Monday about a range of threats that he said were “emanating from” the southern border, which has been plagued by record surges of illegal migration during the Biden administration.

Wray’s comments came during a hearing where he faced questions from several lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee about terrorists, drugs, and other dangers a porous border could allow into the country.

Ranking member Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) asked Wray what risks the “single largest, most eventful migration quarter in history” posed to the United States, to which Wray first pointed to illicit fentanyl.

“From an FBI perspective, we are seeing a wide array of very dangerous threats that emanate from the border, and that includes everything from the drug trafficking, and the FBI alone sees enough fentanyl in the last two years to kill 270 million people,” Wray said. “That’s just on the fentanyl side. An awful lot of violent crime in the United States is at the hands of gangs who are themselves involved in the distribution of that fentanyl.”

Wray testified alongside Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and CIA Director William Burns on the intelligence community’s annual assessment of global threats.

Sen. Angus King (I-ME) told the panel that he had done a “little calculation” and found that “15 people have died in this country of overdoses, mostly fentanyl, since this hearing started” and asked where the drug is originating.

“The vast majority of the fentanyl that’s killing Americans is of course coming from Mexico, and the vast majority of the precursors for that fentanyl is coming from China,” Wray said.

This fiscal year, officials have so far encountered 58 immigrants at the southern border whose names appeared on a terrorist watchlist, according to federal data. That figure coincides with border officials estimating last year that since President Joe Biden took office, more than 1.7 million immigrants have crossed into the country entirely undetected.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) asked if Wray could “tell the American people with any certainty that there are zero people on the terrorist watchlist” that were among the undetected immigrants, also known as “gotaways.”

Wray responded by quoting former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who once famously said there are “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns.”

“In many ways, the national security ramifications of the issues at the border are better reflected in some ways more by what we don’t know about the people who snuck in, provided fake documents, or in some other way got in when there wasn’t sufficient information available at the time they came in to connect the dots, is almost more significant in our view than the actual number of so-called [known or suspected terrorists] because those people, for the most part, are stopped, detained, and processed appropriately,” Wray said.

Cornyn also pointed to border officials encountering tens of thousands of nationals from the U.S.’s top adversary, China, in 2023, noting that the number represented a sharp increase over the previous year. Cornyn asked Wray if more Chinese nationals could have entered the country as gotaways.

“Right, we don’t know what we’re dealing with,” Wray replied. “It gets especially challenging because presumably within that group, you’ve got not only people who may mean us harm but also people who are fleeing the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] and share our concerns about their authoritarian thuggishness.”

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Cornyn observed that the rise presented a “huge, gaping vulnerability that we don’t have answers for.”

Following their public testimonies, Wray and his intelligence community counterparts joined the senators for a closed-door briefing. They will face questioning on global threats again on Tuesday during their annual appearance before the House Intelligence Committee.

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