FBI Director Wray warns of southern border smuggling network with ‘ISIS ties’

FBI Director Christopher Wray told senators on Monday that there are “very dangerous threats” coming from the U.S.-Mexico border, including a smuggling network with "ISIS ties." 

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., asked Wray during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Monday regarding threats at the southern border, Fox News reported. 

Wray responded, saying, "From an FBI perspective, we are seeing a wide array of very dangerous threats that emanate from the border. And that includes everything from drug trafficking — the FBI alone seized enough fentanyl in the last two years to kill 270 million people — that's just on the fentanyl side." 

"An awful lot of the violent crime in the United States is at the hands of gangs who are themselves involved in the distribution of that fentanyl," he added. 

Rubio asked about smuggling networks moving people around the world and whether they could have ties to ISIS or other terrorist organizations. 

"So, I want to be a little bit careful how far I can go in open session, but there is a particular network that, where some of the overseas facilitators of the smuggling network have ISIS ties that we're very concerned about and that we've been spending enormous amount of effort with our partners investigating. Exactly what that network is up to is something that's, again, the subject of our current investigation," Wray said. 

There were more than 2.4 million migrant encounters in fiscal year 2023, and since fiscal year 2024 began, a record number of encounters of more than 300,000.