Government sources told Breitbart News there is a “great uptick” of Special Interest Aliens (SIA) crossing the border since the surge of illegal immigrants have been crossing the southern border. SIAs are individuals entering the United States from foreign countries with terrorist links.

Although the problem of SIAs entering America is not new, Governor Rick Perry recently told Fox News: 

We have record high numbers of other than Mexicans being apprehended at the border. These are people that are coming from states like Syria that have substantial connections back to terrorist regimes and terrorist operations. So we’re seeing record, historic high numbers of these individuals being apprehended.

A source who works among independent American security contractors along the southern border in Arizona and Texas told Breitbart News recently that six individuals from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen were picked up by U.S. border patrol near Laredo, Texas.

“That’s right along [the area] with the ranchers in Texas finding prayer rugs on their ranches, etcetera. [The SIAs] had 60,000 Iraqi Dinars ($51.00) apiece on them.”

According to the security contractor, the SIAs sewed the money into their clothes and claimed to be Mexican.

“The thousands that have been coming over, they’re the cartels. They have been working it really hard. And the aspect that truly concerns me is how they’re linking up with these Islamic extremist groups–Al Shabaab, al Qaeda, Hezbollah,” he said. “It’s an alphabet soup of extremists that have been getting caught from Tijuana to the Gulf, so that concerns me,” the contractor added.

He continued: 

The cartels concern me, but the Islamic extremists concern me. They don’t stop. The cartels, if you put enough pressure on them, if you obstruct their business flow, they’ll go and look for another avenue. The Islamic extremists don’t. They just keep going. They don’t care. They want to die. They want to be martyrs. They just keep going.

In April of 2010, news reports surfaced that 300 Somalis, including many linked to the Al Qaeda group Al-Shabaab, a terrorist organization responsible for worldwide suicide bombings, had entered the U.S. and are still unaccounted for.

By May of that year, Fox News reported an indictment in a Texas federal court of a Somali man charged in Texas of operating a “large-scale smuggling enterprise” responsible for bringing hundreds of Somalis from Brazil through South America and eventually across the Mexican border. Ahmed Muhammad Dhakane was sentenced to ten years in federal prison in April of 2011 after he pleaded guilty to making false statements in his asylum application.

The Dallas Morning News pointed out that in the government’s sentencing memo, “Dhakane stated he did not know their exact reason for wanting to enter the United States, but cautioned that he believed they would fight against the U.S. if the jihad moved from overseas locations to the U.S. mainland.”

More recently, Arizona’s KVOA reported in November of 2013 that federal agents had been capturing “thousands” of “other than Mexicans” attempting to enter the United States. After filing a Freedom of Information Request with the Border Patrol, KVOA found that many of the crossers came from countries considered sponsors of terrorism.

Overseas terrorists have long vowed to use America’s southern border as a way to enter and smuggle weapons into the United States. Kuwaiti professor Abdallah Al-Nafisi threatened five years ago, “Four pounds of anthrax in a suitcase this big carried by a fighter through tunnels from Mexico into the U.S. are guaranteed to kill 330,000 Americans within a single hour, if it is properly spread in population centers there.” He added, “What a horrifying idea. 9/11 will be a small change in comparison.”