If everybody outside of a country can easily cross its border, so can enemies of the country.
A couple of years ago, Newsweek asked: “Is China Sneaking Military Personnel into the U.S. Via Border?” Back then, we were still in the middle of the Biden administration, which had been struggling to keep the border as sieve-like as possible.
Congressmen like Mark Green told the magazine that “many of the Chinese nationals entering America were ‘military-age men,’ many of them having ‘known ties’ to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and People’s Liberation Army (PLA).”
As of April [2023], there had been a total of 9,854 encounters in the fiscal year-to-date, which runs from October to September, rising sharply from February. In 2022, there were 2,176 encounters.
While over 1,500 of these were individuals in a family unit, the vast majority (8,304) were single adults—though a breakdown of age and what proportion are male is not given. Neither has the government publicly stated if any were believed to have ties to Beijing.
Asked about the credibility of Green’s claim, Rebecca Grant Ph.D., a national security analyst at IRIS Independent Research, told Newsweek that she personally believed it to be true, referencing the likelihood of some immigrants having ties to the Chinese state given the many Chinese nationals already in the U.S.—5.4 million in 2021, according to Migration Policy Institute figures.
“If you’re a bad guy that wants to infiltrate operatives into the U.S.A., the southern border is a pretty easy way to do it,” she added.
The Department of Homeland Security assured Newsweek that “biometric and biographical” information was being used to figure out who the terrorists and criminals were, and that “anyone who poses a national security or public safety threat is detained and not released into the United States.”
Some troublemakers might have been stopped that way. All, though?
122 deportees
Last month we learned from the U.S. government that “122 Chinese illegal immigrants deported by Trump admin amid national security concern” and that “some of the illegal immigrants were convicted of human smuggling, rape, murder, drug trafficking, and bribery” (American Military News, July 15, 2025).
According to Heritage Foundation Border Security and Immigration Center Director Lora Ries, the high numbers of Chinese nationals crossing the border at or between ports of entry rose rapidly during the Biden administration, from 1,000 a month “to 2,000, up to 7,000 a month. It even hit over 8,000 one month in December of 2023. And most of these were between the ports of entry….
“Given the many tactics that the Chinese Communist Party uses against the U.S.—whether that is sending fentanyl precursor ingredients to Mexico to be smuggled into the U.S., killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, COVID-19 from Wuhan, spy balloons, buying farmland near military bases—we have to assume that the CCP took advantage of the open border during Biden’s years and sent many Chinese nationals with mal-intent.”
Maybe the 122 Chinese nationals now being kicked out are the worst of all of the illegal immigrants from China—that the U.S. government knows about and has been able to find. Most or all of these deportees may be mere criminals without having been enlisted as an agent for the Chinese Communist Party.
Once inside the United States, CCP spies and saboteurs would take pains to avoid being found and deported. If you’re a Chinese spy of any competence who has not yet been identified as a spy and who is being funded by the Chinese government, hiding your current location in the U.S. from the U.S. government isn’t that hard to do.
Also see:
StoptheCCP.org: “How Many Illegal Chinese Immigrants Are Chinese Spies?”
