Just hours after U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced the border arrests of two Yemeni men on the FBI’s Terrorist Watch List, President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security removed the press release.
The CBP announced the arrests on Monday, but less than 24 hours later the press release was no longer accessible. An archived link to the press release can still be viewed through Internet Archive.
The press release’s removal caught the attention of Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee who demanded to know why the release was taken down.
“Why did you take down your previously public tweet & press release announcing that two people on the terror watch list were apprehended exploiting President Biden’s open border policies?” House Homeland GOP tweeted. “Transparency in name alone is not transparency.”
On March 30, border patrol agents arrested a man for illegally entering the U.S. The agents caught the man about two miles west of the Calexico Port of Entry and transported him to the El Centro Processing Center.
Without providing his name, CBP said they performed a records check on the 26-year-old suspect, identifying him as a Yemeni man on the FBI’s Terrorism Watch List and on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) No-Fly list.
A similar incident took place two months earlier when, on January 29, border patrol agents caught another Yemeni man trying to enter the U.S. through the El Centro border sector on the California-Mexico border. After his arrest, border patrol agents determined the 33-year-old man had also been placed on the FBI’s Terrorism Watch List and on the No-Fly list.
“Part of the Border Patrol’s mission states we will protect the country from terrorists,” Chief Patrol Agent Gregory K. Bovino said in the now-deleted CBP press release. “Today, like every other day, our agents did that. These apprehensions at our border illustrates the importance of our mission and how we can never stop being vigilant in our everyday mission to protect this great country.”
The press release’s deletion isn’t the first attempt by the Biden administration to obfuscate the situation on the southern border; for weeks, the administration prevented media from reporting on overwhelmed facilities housing thousands of unaccompanied illegal immigrant children.
According to internal CBP documents reviewed by ABC, there are 3,889 migrants being held in a Donna, Texas, holding facility that is supposed to hold just 250, putting it 1,556 percent over capacity.
In response to the Biden administration blocking reporters from documenting border facilities, Senator Ted Cruz and Senator John Cornyn led a Senate delegation to the Texas-Mexico border to view the overcrowded facilities themselves.
While touring the Donna facility, a Biden administration staffer blocked Senator Cruz from filming the facility’s conditions, according to a video Cruz posted to Twitter.
In the video, the woman identified by Cruz as a recently-hired senior advisor for the Biden administration repeatedly stepped in front of the senator’s camera in an attempt to block the recording.
“How far is Joe Biden going to stop the American people from seeing inside the Donna CBP facility? Biden sent a political operative from DC to block our cameras and even threatened another senator to obstruct legitimate congressional oversight,” Cruz said in a Tweet along with the video.
