Nota Bene:

We now know that at least 151 people on the FBI’s terror watch list have been stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border so far this year. What we have not known — until now — was how many people from potentially problematic countries have attempted to enter America illegally in the past few years.

Fox News’s Bill Melugin reports Tuesday, attributed to sources in the Customs and Border Protection department, that tens of thousands of so-called “special interest aliens” have been stopped trying to sneak across the border in the last two years hailing from countries such as Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, and others. The term is used by the government to denote people from countries that favor or harbor terrorism or pose a potential national security threat to the country.

Like most migrants apprehended in the scrub deserts between points of entry, many were released into the United States and told to appear for a court appearance often years into the future. By Mr. Melugin’s count, 538 of them were from Syria, 659 from Iran, more than 6,000 from Afghanistan, 3,153 from Egypt, 1,613 from Pakistan, and more than 13,000 from Uzbekistan. The numbers do not include people who escaped capture or entered undetected.

“Border Patrol sources tell me they have extreme concerns about who is coming into the country because they have little to no way of vetting people from these special interest countries,” Mr. Melugin writes. “I’m told unless they have committed a crime previously in the US, or they are on some sort of federal watchlist, there’s no way to know who they are because most of their home countries don’t share data/records with the US so there is nothing to match a name to when [Border Patrol] agents run fingerprints.”

Mr. Melugin’s concerns might explain why the attorneys general from 27 states wrote to the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, Tuesday asking the Biden administration to end its practice of releasing migrants wholesale in the United States. The attorney general from Florida, Ashley Moody, is leading the effort and says the weekend’s terror attacks in Israel have made their request all the more urgent.

“The Biden administration has let more than 7 million illegal immigrants across the U.S. border — including more than 1.5 million gotaways and 264 suspected terrorists,” Ms. Moody says. “Given the massive flood of unvetted migrants into the interior of our country, there is no way to know who is in the U.S. or if they plan to enact terror on Americans,” she said.

More Warnings About America’s Unsustainable National Debt

The Biden administration has managed to add half a trillion dollars to the national debt in the past three weeks alone. The total debt blew through the $33 trillion mark on September 15 and is not looking back. A Republican congressman from Kentucky, Thomas Massie, has taken to wearing a badge around Capitol Hill that is updated via wifi with precise numbers from the Treasury Department. He says the already staggering figure is rising at a rate of about $70,000 a second.

Just how screwed is America if this continues? The Penn Wharton Budget Model projects that in a best-case scenario, the country has less than 20 years to get its fiscal house in order, or all hell will break loose.  “Under current policy, the United States has about 20 years for corrective action after which no amount of future tax increases or spending cuts could avoid the government defaulting on its debt whether explicitly or implicitly,” the Penn-Wharton analysts write. “Unlike technical defaults where payments are merely delayed, this default would be much larger and would reverberate across the U.S. and world economies.”

To repeat. That is a best-case scenario. “This time frame is the ‘best case’ scenario for the United States, under markets conditions where participants believe that corrective fiscal actions will happen ahead of time,” the analysts continue. “If, instead, they started to believe otherwise, debt dynamics would make the time window for corrective action even shorter.”

The Congressional Budget Office reported Tuesday that Biden’s budget deficit in fiscal 2023 was $1.7 trillion, a $300 billion increase over the deficit recorded in fiscal 2022 — unprecedented in American history but for years of noteworthy events such as world wars or global pandemics.

Also Noteworthy:

• Texas has now bused some 50,000 migrants to large cities in the interior from cities on the border.
• Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s superPAC raised $11 million in the hours after he announced his independent bid for the presidency.
• The EU foreign policy chief says that the “overwhelming majority” of member states oppose suspending aid to the Palestinian Authority.
• Office space vacancies are now at a 20-year high in American and British cities.
• The American Petroleum Institute says new rules being pushed by the Biden administration would lead to a 24 percent reduction in U.S. energy production.
• The EU promises to do “as much as possible” to hobble its own economy by eliminating the use of fossil fuels.
• Clarence Thomas says yet again that the Supreme Court should review the “actual malice” standard that makes it difficult to sue American media outlets for defamation.
• The Biden administration is leaning into the idea that climate change is an existential threat to humanity and the most serious challenge facing the planet.
• An orthodox Jewish man stood at a counter at New York’s JFK airport and paid for the plane tickets of Israeli reservists flying home Monday. He paid for 250 tickets.