Tim Healy, the former director of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center under President Barack Obama, said on Monday’s Fox News Channel broadcast of “America’s Newsroom” that he has had “sleepless nights” due to the number of people he has encountered at the border who are on terror watch lists, and that the numbers are far higher than what worried him when he was running the Screening Center.
“From my perspective at the Terrorist Screening Center, you’ve had 336 known or suspected terrorists caught between entrance sites along the southern border during the previous three years,” stated Healy.
“During the last four fiscal years—2017, 2018, 2019, and 20—there were 14. Thus, that gave us restless evenings, in my opinion.”
“As the head of the Terrorist Screening Center, I had a program that I termed the gold program,” he said. “We had 100 interactions a day on average, and I would have them highlight in gold the ones that weren’t ongoing FBI cases when I received daily briefings on the encounters. We’d get one or two a month on average. Hence, a maximum of 12–24. And the reason I was worried about those 24 was that they weren’t FBI-known; instead, they were seen in the United States, usually by law enforcement officials. That person is someone we don’t know who is on the watch list. I thus made sure the FBI was investigating those 24 instances because I was worried about them. There are 336 now. Additionally, there are the gotaways, so it’s a serious issue.”
