People Killed and Injured by Foreign-Born Terrorists by President
Biden Has the Least Terrorism Deaths and Injuries of Any President Since 1975
Terrorists crossing the border is a major talking point in the 2024 political campaign for president. Trump won’t stop talking about the number of terrorists who have crossed the border during the Biden administration, and Republican members of Congress have held so many hearings on the topic that I've lost count, although I've testified at two of them. The entire argument rests on the elevated number of border crossers who are on the terrorism screening dataset (TSDS) since Biden took office, as seen in the chart below, which has almost 18 million views on X so far.
The chart above is a bad metric of terrorism in the United States because it’s not a measure of attacks, attempted attacks, deaths in attacks, injuries, or even of terrorists. Ignore for a moment that the chart above does not include the most recent TSDS data, but not a single one of those individuals committed a terrorist attack or are even accused of planning one. The TSDS has many other problems and is unreliable. As Michael J. Ard and I wrote:
Not even one of those . . . individuals, none of whom should be in the United States, committed an attack or are accused of planning an attack or attempted terrorism. The watchlist is not a great measure of risk, and inclusion therein does not mean that someone is a terrorist. According to Christopher Piehota, the former director of the Terrorism Screening Center, the already lax standards required to include somebody on the list are relaxed further to aid the State Department and Department of Homeland Security in immigration and border enforcement. According to a 2023 report by the US Congress' Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, many Americans have been misidentified by the watchlist, especially Muslims and Sikhs who have common last names, and the risk of misidentification only increases as the 1.8 million-name watchlist has expanded.
The real number of people murdered and injured in terrorist attacks committed on US soil shows we haven't suffered this little from foreign-born terrorism at any point since 1975. Zero people have been murdered by foreign-born terrorists on US soil during the Biden administration so far, which is below the number of every president since Ford. There has been one injury in an attack committed by Canadian David DePape, who attempted to assault Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and instead injured her husband. DePape is a lunatic who appears to have been motivated by a conspiracy-fueled version of right-wing ideology.
Despite nativist fears of foreign-born Islamist terrorists crossing the border to kill Americans, the only example of an actual attack during the Biden administration was committed by a Canadian right-winger who tried to attack a prominent Democratic politician. A terrorist could illegally cross the US-Mexico border and commit an attack. It's certainly not impossible, as I've written before, but the risk is small, and the focus on it is grossly disproportionate to the actual and potential harm.
Foreign-born terrorism is exceptionally uncommon, accounting for about 0.3 percent of all people murdered on US soil since 1975. That includes the deaths in 9/11, the deadliest and most destructive terrorist attack in world history. Terrorism is infrequent, and most terrorists don't even kill or injure anybody in their attempted attacks. The Biden administration doesn’t deserve credit for the lowest level of foreign-born terrorism on US soil since the Ford administration, but he certainly doesn’t deserve blame for a surge in foreign-born terrorism that didn’t happen either.