How many people from terrorism-sponsoring states enter the U.S. illegally?

place on the southwestern border that year, according to Cornyn’s chart, and that leaves 814 arrests, mostly of Cubans.

It thus appears that 87 percent of the apprehensions of citizens from terrorism-sponsoring countries occurred away from the southwestern border.

The American-Statesman asked the Border Patrol to confirm the information in Cornyn’s chart, but the agency declined. “For operational integrity and intelligence-based targeting, the Border Patrol does not specifically list country of birth to the location of apprehension,” Border Patrol spokesman Mark Qualia said.

To try to verify that the data were authentic, the paper asked Cornyn’s office to show it the accompanying e-mail from the agency; Brandewie declined.

Border Patrol statistics that the agency either publishes online or confirmed for the paper, however, lend statistical support to Cornyn’s claim.

For instance: The vast majority of apprehensions of people from countries other than Mexico occur on the southwestern border, 86 percent in fiscal 2009. So it is statistically likely that some of the apprehensions of people from countries that sponsor terrorism take place there, too.

While total nationwide Border Patrol apprehensions have dropped 72 percent over the past decade, arrests of people from nations other than Mexico increased 49 percent. Have arrests of people from the “state sponsor of terrorism” nations also gone up?

Not as far as it is possible to tell. The paper asked the Border Patrol for a country-by-country breakdown for fiscal 2005, midway through the Bush administration and one of the peak years for total apprehensions in the past decade, as well as other years. All it received was the data for 2005, when six nations had the “terrorism” label: Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. Nationwide in 2005, there were 3,309 apprehensions of people from terrorism-sponsoring countries out of a total of 1,189,000. That compares to the 935 apprehensions in 2009 out of a total of 556,041.

In fiscal 2010, the nationwide apprehensions of people from the four terrorism-sponsoring countries dropped again, to 736.

What of Cornyn’s larger argument: that the arrests of people from Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria show that the federal government’s approach to security on the southwestern border is not working and that the border is vulnerable to penetration by terrorists crossing illegally?

“We’re not going to tackle the first point, which is a political bone of contention,” the American-Statesman writes. “We’re also mindful of the logic that any arrests are evidence that border security efforts are working. But we