WASHINGTON -- In one of her last speeches as a member of Congress, Rep. Michele Bachmann alleged border patrol agents aren't stopping "anyone" from entering the United States.

"I drove from the mouth of the Rio Grande to Boca Chica. It was shocking," she said, in a speech to the Heritage Foundation Wednesday. "The border control doesn't stop anyone from coming into the United States. And it's not their fault. It's the politicians' fault. Any foreign national who wants to come across the southern border comes in, they don't always get to stay necessarily, but they definitely get to come in."

The fact-checking website Politifact said that border patrol manpower along the nation's southern frontier is at an all-time modern high. There were 17,659 agents stationed along the southwest border of Mexico in 2011, Politifact said. The Department of Homeland Security shows a 412 percent increase in southwest border apprehensions from last year to this year, including family units and unaccompanied minors.

Bachmann alleged that if President Barack Obama granted amnesty to people living in the United States illegally, there would "presumably" be terrorists in that mix.

"When the president of the United States announced publicly that yes he was going to, by himself, unilaterally, grant amnesty to potentially millions of people illegally here in the United States. Presumably some of them could be terrorists that are in the United States who illegally have come across our southern border. That's one of our greatest fears. We don't know, but that's one of our greatest fears today."

The two Americans who were killed fighting with ISIS were both naturalized citizens.

Bachmann also said the United States is the most generous country in the world in letting in legal immigrants. She said that by admitting more than one million legal immigrants as permanent residents annually, it topped all other countries' legal immigration numbers combined.

"If you took every other country in the world and you took the number of people they allow in for immigration and you added it up … every country in the world together doesn't equal what the United States allows in immigration in one year."

The Migration Policy Institute says this is only partially true. While the U.S. does allow in the most immigrants of any other country in the world, it's not more than all other countries combined.

"You will see that if you add up just a handful of the top countries (Spain, the UK, Italy, Germany and Canada) you top one million and that is before you add other ... countries," a spokeswoman wrote in an email.

Bachmann touted her proposed legislation that would give federal officials the right to revoke passport privileges of Americans who fight for terrorist organizations. She said Minnesota has a "tragic nexus to terrorism" given the two Americans who have died abroad fighting with the terrorist group had Minnesota ties.
"We need to take this threat from the Islamic State extremely seriously," she said.