It’s not just about illegal aliens working in the United States tax free, using government sponsored health care and education, and shifting their earnings to their families abroad. The federal government’s failure to secure our borders has created a potentially severe security situation, not just in the south west, but all over the United States. We’ve got tens of thousands of troops protecting the borders in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we’re unable to stop the flow of people coming in through our own southern border.

Atlanta’s WSB-TV2 aired a segment on U.S. border security after it obtained records from a federal detention center near Phoenix, Ariz., and found current listings for illegal aliens from Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan and Yemen.

“We have left the back door to the United States open,” former Rep. J.D. Hayworth told the station. “We have to understand that there are definitely people who mean to do us harm who have crossed that border.”

WSB-TV 2 published a population breakdown from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement staging facility in Florence, Ariz., dated April 15, 2010, which includes detainees from as far away as Afghanistan, Armenia, Bosnia, Egypt, Ghana, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Kenya, Morocco, Pakistan, Sudan, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Botswana, Turkey and many other countries.

Based on U.S. Border Patrol statistics, there were 30,147 OTMs apprehended in fiscal year 2003; 44, 614 in fiscal year 2004; 165,178 in fiscal year 2005; and 108,025 in fiscal year 2006. Most were caught along the U.S. Southwest border.

According to the Department of Homeland Security’s 2008 Yearbook of Immigration Studies, from the Office of Immigration Statistics, federal law enforcement agencies detained 791,568 deportable aliens in fiscal year 2008  and 5,506 of them were from 14 “special-interest countries.”

Watch the WSB-TV2 two-part investigative report below:

Part 2:

Hat tip Woodpile Report