After three years of America Last border policies from the federal government, the consequences for U.S. national security are beginning to become clearer.

Last month, two illegal aliens from Jordan attempted to breach a Marine base in Quantico, Virginia. Posing as Amazon delivery drivers, the two men attempted to ram their truck into the gate of the facility after being stopped for inspection. This has renewed fears over the national-security threats posed by America’s surrendered border. One former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent suggested the incident could be a trial run for a major attack, comparing the Jordanian nationals to “the 9/11 hijackers trying to get aboard planes with box cutters on other occasions prior to actually perpetrating the act.”

In recent years, experts on border security have warned that soft border policies emanating from the federal government have put U.S. national security in a perilous position, and have set the stage for another 9/11-style attack on the homeland. Immigration-related national-security failures were a major reason why the attacks happened 23 years ago, as several of the hijackers on that fateful day were in the country illegally on expired visas.

While we don’t know their motives, the fact that two illegal aliens felt emboldened enough to attack a military base is enough to raise concern about the threat level resulting from the Biden administration’s anti-border policies. Adding to this concern is another suspicious incident that occurred at another military base on the very same day.

On May 3, a U.S. Army Colonel reportedly shot and killed a Chechen man at Fort Liberty, formerly known as Fort Bragg, N.C., after the man and another Chechen man reportedly intruded near the property. The incident remains under investigation and not much is known publicly about the parties involved or their possible motives, so it would be unwise to speculate. Still, the incident is part of a disturbing pattern that should raise alarm bells about our national security.

These infiltrations of U.S. military bases are not isolated incidents, but real-world examples of the potential threats posed by the reality that the U.S. government has forfeited operational control of our border. It is essential that every sovereign nation, especially one that always has a target on its back like the United States, be aware of who’s coming here, why they’re coming here, and where they’re coming from.

Right now, it is simply impossible to believe the federal government is upholding these basic national-security requirements. In fact, government officials charged with defending the homeland from terror threats have admitted on repeated occasions that they have been unable to locate potential terrorists who have crossed the border illegally.

During a House Homeland Security hearing late last year, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas would not confirm that Customs and Border Protection has been able to apprehend all suspected terrorists who have entered the country illegally, while FBI Director Christopher Wray admitted that his agency was still attempting to locate illegal-alien suspected terrorists. Just two months ago, Wray testified before Congress that the terror threat facing the United States was the highest it has been in a “long, long time.”

The testimony from top national-security officials supplements the data that demonstrates just how out of control the crisis at the southern border has spiraled. Given the millions of illegal aliens who have entered the U.S. over the past three years, it is highly unlikely that the government has sufficiently vetted all of these people before processing them into the U.S. The number of individuals on the terror watch list who have crossed the border illegally is up 2,500 percent since 2020, and those are just the ones we know about. These numbers don’t account for the 1.7 million “gotaways” that have been recorded over the past three years, which are more than the entire previous decade combined, but the national security threats emanating from the nation’s open border does not just stem from terror states, but economic and military competitors as well.

The fastest-growing group of illegal aliens are from China, perhaps the top geopolitical adversary to the U.S. Thirty-thousand Chinese illegal aliens have been apprehended at the border in the past seven months. It defies belief that this type of movement from China to the United States is possible without the knowledge and consent of the Chinese Communist Party. Regardless of the motives, mass migration of citizens from foreign adversaries is always something that should be heavily policed. At the moment, all our leaders can muster is a collective shrug.

The attempted infiltration of two different military bases indicates that years of anti-border policies are taking its toll on U.S. national security. The overall data suggests that the threats to the homeland will keep coming and keep growing until something significant changes.

Dale Wilcox is executive director and general counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a public-interest law firm working to defend the rights and interests of the American people from the negative effects of mass migration.