U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents working with Mexican immigration officials have found thousands of non-Hispanic illegal immigrants crossing Mexico’s southern border to make their way to Texas. The “extra-continental” immigrants enter countries as far south as Brazil and make their way to the United States, often with forged travel documents.

“The reality is that the vast majority of the people that Mexico encounters [on its southern border] that are extra-continental will eventually end up on our border,” a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official told Reuters this week. The Reuters article confirmed the Syrian nationals reported at the Mexican border with Laredo last year by Breitbart Texas’s Brandon Darby and Ildefonso Ortiz are part of this growing pattern of illegal migration. Just a few days after that, Darby and this writer broke the news of six men from Pakistan and Afghanistan being arrested about sixteen miles inside the United States in Arizona. Those men were quickly snatched up from the Border Patrol’s custody by the FBI. Shortly after that, five more Syrian Nationals were detained at the Laredo port of entry.

Since that time, the federal government has been largely silent on the numbers of what they call “Special Interest Aliens” (SIA) being captured in Texas and other border states. The new information obtained by Reuters shows that 6,342 SIAs were apprehended at Mexico’s southern border. That number is up significantly from a 2015 total of 4,261 SIAs. Only 1,831 were reported for all of 2014 when Breitbart Texas’ Brandon Darby reported a leaked intelligence document from CBP official showing countries from all over the world were exploiting the porous southern border between the United States and Mexico. Most of those SIA tend to enter the U.S. through Texas.

That document revealed large numbers of illegal aliens being apprehended in the United States from China, Pakistan, Egypt, Yemen, North Africa, and other Middle Eastern countries.

The problem is so large in Mexico, officials have set up a detention camp in Tapachula, near Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala. CBP officials have been training the Mexican immigration officials on interview techniques. They have also been using U.S. databases to investigate the background of these immigrants to Mexico, Reuters reported.

“The Tapachula area is along a permeable border. DHS (Department of Homeland Security) views it as one of the areas where a terrorist group that wants to do harm on U.S. soil would be most likely to come in,” Adam Isacson, a security and border policy analyst at The Washington Office on Latin America, a non-profit human rights advocacy group, told Reuters.

These CBP officials have been stationed in southern Mexico since last October according to the documents obtained by Reuters. The operation is similar to a program set up on Panama by CBP earlier this year.

Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX.