Rep. Hunter: 'Monumental Failure' Allowed Afghan to Slip Over Mexican Border

The United States does not know who is coming into the country across the Mexican border or what they're bringing into the country, Rep. Duncan Hunter, who obtained Homeland Security documents detailing the capture of an Afghan national with alleged ties to the Taliban last year, said Friday.

"The American people would have had no clue on this if we didn't get these documents from Homeland Security," the California Republican told Fox News' "America's Newsroom." Hunter is leading the investigation and also serves as co-chair of Donald Trump's congressional liaison committee.

Last fall, the man, who allegedly planned to carry out a terror plot in North America, was captured after he was smuggled into the country over the Mexican border. However, his ties were not initially flagged in a terror database and not reported last November, said Duncan.

The incident represents a "monumental failure," Hunter told the Fox program.

"On the back of the napkin math that border patrol agents do, they say for every one guy they catch, two or three make it through," said Hunter. "If you catch one Afghan with terrorist ties, you can assume others have gotten through."

Also, the border patrol's database did not flag the man, but instead had to use a different database to tag his background.

"The same time there were five Pakistanis with him," said Hunter. "We don't know where the Pakistanis are at all. They weren't flagged on anybody's database. We're trying to track down whether they were released in the U.S. Just like they were here in San Diego trying to find work, or whether they were flagged and kept in custody."

Americans would not have known if the documents from Homeland Security were not obtained, said Hunter, but the Obama administration and Homeland Security "tries to make it look like the only people coming across the border are nice people looking for work. They don't have anything bad to do or say about Americans. That simply isn't true."

The Afghan man said he crossed the border on Nov. 13, 2015, by crawling under a border fence near Nogales, Arizona, But after the initial database check didn't flag him, all six immigrants were cleared by the National Targeting Center, reports Fox News.

"When you probably have multiple databases with multiple government contractors that probably costs taxpayers tens of millions of dollars that don't talk to each other this goes into whole different direction as opposed to using commercial software from Silicon Valley where everything would sync up, this is monumental failure," said Hunter. "When you think about 2001, we're 15 years from 9/11 and we still don't have homeland security bases that sync up with the Department of Defense and FBI's master terror watch list."

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