“We are in the midst of the greatest border crisis in U.S. history, by every metric,” says Todd Bensman. “When Title 42 goes away, this will spur 18,000 a day crossing. We’re at about 7,500 a day now.”
Todd Bensman is an award-winning field journalist and a national security fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies. He’s the author of “America’s Covert Border War” and the forthcoming book “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.”
“A school district in Texas … has been overwhelmed with 50,000 to 75,000 illegal immigrant families that have absolutely swamped the school district,” says Bensman.
We speak about current abuses of U.S. asylum law, Mexican ant operations, the migrant terror threat, and what Bensman calls the “migrant advocacy industrial complex.”
“Mayorkas is telling us all along: We are going to create legal pathways to cross the southern border. That’s unprecedented,” says Bensman.
Interview trailer:
Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/from-asylum-fraud-to-mexican-ant-operations-todd-bensman-on-bidens-migrant-advocacy-industrial-complex_4902259.html
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Todd Bensman, such a pleasure to have you on American thought leaders.
Todd Bensman:
Thank you. I very much appreciate being here.
Mr. Jekielek:
I’ve just been reading your book, Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History, which is forthcoming. It hasn’t been published yet. Wow. I understood from the reporting of Charlotte Cuthbertson, our border reporter and many others, that there is a dire situation at the border, with all sorts of related issues. I had not realized the depth and breadth of it until I read your book, so thank you for this. You approach it from so many different angles. I want to start with this. Why don’t you give us an overall picture of what is happening?
Mr. Bensman:
We are in the midst of the greatest border crisis in U.S. history, by every metric. This is a crisis that goes beyond anything in the American experience. Even dating back to Ellis Island, this is something that the generations down the line will remember and study. The book has a lot of numbers in it, but it’s not just a story of numbers. But the numbers are nonpartisan, and those numbers tell us that we are at millions of apprehensions. We are in hundreds of thousands a month.
Whereas in decades past, we are in tens of thousands a month. We were in 400,000 a year territory in the past. We are now in 2.3 million in a single fiscal year, another 1.7 million in the first year of the Biden administration, and 4.4 million apprehensions at the border in a 24-month span. That does not even include the got aways, the number of people that we didn’t catch that are logged in the books at another 1 million at least. And a presumed additional million.
These numbers are just beyond anything that we have ever seen before, and I don’t think that the American public has yet appreciated it, because media coverage has been very episodic and spotty, and frankly, partisan.The purpose of the book is to frame this in not just numbers, but in the human story of what’s happening here. Because these are real people that are coming. This is an impact that will transform America.
Mr. Jekielek:
One way or another you’re saying in the book, that impact is happening no matter what happens. Even tomorrow.
Mr. Bensman:
It’s too late. We are in this now. The book is a marker of up to a certain point, because this is still very much an ongoing crisis as you and I sit here talking about it, and as the book publishes. But we have to understand how it started and how it got to this point in order to change the trajectory of it, if we want to continue as a country.
Mr. Jekielek:
You mentioned some very large numbers moments ago. But the bottom line in terms of how many illegal immigrants are in the country at this point, within the last let’s say couple of years, what is that number?
Mr. Bensman:
It does get a little bit complicated, because there is a Trump era expulsion policy. Title 42 is a pandemic era measure that was put in place by Donald Trump that allowed the Border Patrol to immediately expel all people that they apprehended at the border back into Mexico, where they can turn around and come back again. But there was this constant pushback.
The Biden administration maintained Title 42 and still does even to this day that we’re talking, but has dramatically reduced the number of people that push back. So the four-plus million that have been apprehended were not all let in. The Biden administration let in about 40% of those in the first year, and now they’re letting in about 70% of those.
But there’s still a good 30% that are being pushed back. But the number that have actually been admitted legally is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.7 million. And then you can add to that another million who got away that are in. Not legally, but they’re in. They’re presumed to be in.
The number is pushing toward 3 million that are actually in. Title 42 is under attack in the courts. The Biden administration has tried everything it could to eliminate Title 42 so that 100 per cent of everybody who comes to the border can get in. The intelligence community is estimating as of now that when Title 42 goes away, this will spur an 18,000 per day crossing.
We’re at about 7,500 a day now. 18,000 per day will do something to the country that we’ve never seen before. It will be a tidal wave, an unbelievable tidal wave. And they’re trying to prepare for that, to process that into the country.
When I say that by the end of the Biden administration, depending on what happens with 42, we should have 6 million people actually enter the country and maybe more, depending on how close to accurate the intelligence community is.
Mr. Jekielek:
Shocking is the only word that comes to my mind.
Mr. Bensman:
They’re huge numbers.
Mr. Jekielek:
They’re huge numbers. And of course, these are all people out looking for a better life. Maybe I can just get you to tell me the trajectory of your career. Because you’ve actually approached this whole issue from a whole bunch of different vantage points over the years. And I think it’s important for people to know.
Mr. Bensman:
First of all, I’m a classically trained journalist, a reporter with 23 years in the field for big newspapers like the Dallas Morning News, and 10 years at Hearst and CBS. Both of my undergraduate degrees are in journalism and my master’s degree is in journalism from University of Missouri. And I’ve got 23 years on the ground all over the world doing this, including in Mexico and all along the Texas border.
And after my journalism career, I was recruited to join the Texas Department of Public Safety Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism Division here in Texas, where I sort of disappeared, and went anonymous, and was an intelligence practitioner that worked primarily on counter-terrorism issues at the Texas Fusion Center with federal partners.
But I was substantially targeting border issues and illegal immigrants crossing the border who are coming from Middle Eastern countries and places where terrorist activity is pretty prevalent. That was an intelligence project and program that I did for all nine-plus years that I worked for the agency.
More recently in 2018, I was recruited to join the Center for Immigration Studies, which is a think tank out of Washington DC. I took that job, and have kind of come full circle back to reporting, and writing, and communicating above board, overtly about the border.
I come at this from a perspective of a homeland security practitioner. I look at this as a national security threat. I can’t help it. It’s a homeland security issue. But I also come at it from the perspective of a journalist who’s classically trained in balancing information and presenting stories in the most honest, possible way that I can, even though it’s such a partisan issue. That’s kind of where I come at it as a storyteller with journalism background. But also, I’m a law enforcement guy. I’m a little bit blue in the law enforcement arena. I can’t help that. I know too much.
Mr. Jekielek:
What is the threat of national security threat of 6 million people being in the country?
Mr. Bensman:
The major problem with having a border that is this out of control at this level of utter pandemonium is that people arrive at the border often without identification. We have no idea who any of them are. They can tell us, “My name is Mickey Mouse and I’m from X country,” and we let them in without any idea of whether their word is true, and sound, and verifiable. And that’s really the problem. It’s a stranger danger issue from my vantage point.
You have people coming from 150 different countries, from all over Africa where there are war torn tribal militias committing atrocities against the civilian population, or you have people coming from Syria, and Iraq, and from China, and from places that are adversarial to the United States. You have spies, espionage problems, war criminals, and terrorists. And when 900,000 or a million, or a million-and-a-half people cross without even being detected, you can’t even run their fingerprints. That is by definition, a major national security threat to America.
Mr. Jekielek:
Previously, you wrote a book which focused a bit on immigration, especially from the Middle East and some of the issues associated with that. Very briefly, because I want to focus on this new work, but what did you find?
Mr. Bensman:
America’s Covert Border War encompasses almost everything that I know about the terror threat of people crossing the southern border, trying to infiltrate our external guarded perimeter from countries of national security concern, like Syria. There’s 40-plus countries where we know there are terrorist operatives and organizations.
The issue with people coming over the border from those places was addressed after 9/11. The question of it, the threat of it was addressed after 9/11 in the form of counter-terrorism programs that are elaborate and expansive, and are all along our border and beyond all the way to the tip of South America that the American people have never been told about.
The book is an expose of those programs—what we did, what we’re still doing, and what we’re supposed to do, and how those programs so far have protected the American public from an attack from that southern flank.
The book is still relevant in the context of the current crisis. Because now, we know that the greatest number of people on the FBI terror watch list that have crossed the border have been apprehended that we know are already on the watch list. As of the time we’re talking here, it’s probably about 125 who are already on the watch list in a 24 month span.
When I was working in intelligence, this was what I did. I worked on this project. I put everything that I know into the book that would not get me put in prison. This is really the most information about that threat issue that is available out there.
Because remember that the American media establishment denies that it’s a problem, and that it’s even happening. When Donald Trump came out a few years ago and said, “Hey, there are terrorists crossing the border. I know it.” They laughed him out of town, they ridiculed him, and they did fact checks. But now the Biden administration puts it up on their .gov website, how many terrorists cross the border every month. So, they can’t say that anymore.
In the context of the border crisis that we have now, these programs that I write about in America’s Covert Border War are off the rails. They are absolutely degraded and not happening now, and I believe that the country is at a greater elevated threat from that than it has ever been since 9/11.
Mr. Jekielek:
You dedicated a chapter to talking about how the U.S. asylum system essentially incentivizes lying, and incentivizes people to misrepresent their reality, so that they can get in if they know how to do that. Everything you just told me right now troubles me even more so knowing this.
Mr. Bensman:
That’s right. The key to border security in this country is the way our asylum law is written, and used, and abused on a massive scale. It’s set up so that regular economic migrants who just want to work can use this to get past Border Patrol, and to bypass congressional statutes that require their deportation.
There are NGOs, there are non-governmental organizations and American lawyers who are down there all day long teaching them what to say, what not to say, so that they can pass the initial screening that gets them into the country to stay forever. That’s really the problem with the southern border—the U.S. asylum system.
It has to be eliminated completely and rebuilt from scratch in order to prevent these mass migration crises. We’ll never get past this until we utterly reform the U.S. asylum system from top to bottom, and the law behind it.
People who are crossing the border in this crisis understand, and the people that want them to cross understand the vitality, the crucial function that asylum plays in enabling this mass migration. You just have to say, “I want asylum,” and you’re in.
Mr. Jekielek:
But to eliminate the asylum law together, that seems extreme and cold.
Mr. Bensman:
Right. I’m not saying eliminate it permanently. I’m saying put this thing on ice and rebuild it so that it can’t be abused in the way it’s being abused.
I’ll give you an example. One of the highest nationality volumes that come into the country are from Guatemala, from the Central Highlands of Guatemala. The central Highlands of Guatemala is a poor area. It’s an indigenous people’s subsistence, kind of hand to mouth. They have had small farms for generations before them.
But they are crossing and saying that they are suffering political persecution. I went to the Guatemala Highlands to see what was going on there, and what I found were that the people that are crossing the U.S. and claiming government persecution are actually going for the sole purpose of building huge houses in their home villages, so that they could return to these and live in them. People who plan to return to your home village are not asylum seekers. They are asylum fraudsters abusing our system.
And also, people who are genuinely seeking asylum from political persecution, which is what the asylum law is for, don’t reinvest their American earnings back in the terrible town that they’re fleeing and can’t go back to, where their relatives are building the houses for them to return. I was there. I interviewed many people who are building these houses. And they make no pretense that there is any problem in their villages. They’re just poor people.
That is not what the asylum system is built for. The asylum law was put in place for people who are fleeing North Korean gulags, or Jews fleeing a Nazi situation, or you could even argue people that are being imprisoned in China who could manage to find their way here.
The other thing that people forget is that we have a lot of people coming from Africa right now, from war torn places, terrible places. I grant you that. Nobody wants to live in Haiti, nobody wants to live in some of these war torn countries. But if you are crossing 10 other perfectly safe countries first to get here, your argument that you’re coming for asylum is deeply undermined. Because when you are truly drowning, you don’t decide which of the 10 life rafts were thrown at you to grab is the best one. You grab the first one.
That’s not what’s happening. These journeys are planned. They are rational choices that are being made for economic reasons, because the United States is the best place in the world to live. It’s certainly understandable that people would want to improve their economic fortunes, and live in a country that kind of works, has a court system, and has police that actually do protect and serve.
But, our asylum system is not the way to do that. There’s a legal way to do it. And it is a crime to lie to government officials about the persecution that you suffered and that you’re coming here for, to escape certain death.
Mr. Jekielek:
You mentioned Haiti. And you cover Haiti in the book quite a bit, and especially this program where the Biden administration actually had to send people back to Haiti.
Mr. Bensman:
Let me just start by saying that the majority of Haitians, I would say not just the majority, but the super majority of Haitians that have crossed our southern border to claim asylum already had asylum in two countries, Brazil and Chile. Those governments gave Haitians full residency, and full work authorization. And there actually was work. They were making money, and they were secure. They enjoyed those countries. I’ve interviewed many, many dozens, I would say hundreds of Haitians.
When they get to our border, they tell the media and they tell our asylum officers that they’re coming directly from Haiti, when they’ve been living in these other places for years, three, four, five years with asylum already. So the foundation of their claims for coming here are already compromised. It’s a lie.
Mr. Jekielek:
How are you so sure that all these people have asylum already?
Mr. Bensman:
Because they throw their identification on the ground just before they enter, and we can find them. They’re everywhere. You can fill grocery bags with them. These are Chilean residency cards that have Haitian faces on them. They try to destroy them. This one’s burned. These are evidence of asylum fraud.
Because when Haitians get caught with one of these, they’re not going to be admitted into the United States. So, they try to burn them. They throw them in the river. And the ones that get thrown in the river wash up on the ground, or they just throw them on the ground on the Mexican side and anybody can go down there and scoop these up.
That being said, so many started coming into the United States all at once, because they told me the Biden administration made it possible for them to be admitted legally when they showed up. So they pulled up stakes in Chile and Brazil and took advantage of it.
Of course, they’re rational people and they’re making economic decisions based on pure logic. If you know that you’re finally going to get in, they’re going to let you in, you’re going to upgrade. I had one Haitian explain to me in Costa Rica as he was moving through, I said, “How did you compare life in Chile to life in Haiti?” And he says, “It was 1,000 times better.” “So then why would you give up a lifestyle that was 1,000 times better than Haiti to come to the United States?” And he says, “Because the United States is a million times better.”
Now they came in such huge numbers in such a quick time that it caused a political crisis for the Biden administration. They had a political problem with a massive encampment that formed 15,000 Haitians under the Del Rio Texas Bridge in September. And it wasn’t going away. They kept piling in from Mexico through there. I was there for the entire period of that inside the camp, and in Mexico, and interviewing them all around.
I interviewed the U.S. Ambassador to Haiti who was appointed by the Biden administration just two months earlier. And he told me on the record that the Biden administration decided that it had to close that camp, because a year later we would have the American midterms. They couldn’t still have that camp around on the banks looking like that. So, they decided to shut it down.
The primary way that they decided to shut it down was by using a Trump era tactic that has been roundly criticized by liberal progressives. And it’s air deportation, to Haiti of all places. Remember these people were not living in Haiti for years. The worst nightmare for those particular Haitians was to be returned to Haiti.
The problem is that they had to have the government agree to take them in Haiti. And Haiti’s president had just been assassinated. So, there was nobody there. But they were about to have democratic elections the first time in years. And it was scheduled for November 7th. Just a couple months later, everything was set.
The Biden administration decided to scuttle those elections, to scuttle that democracy, and to anoint a dictator, Dr. Ariel Henry. And they installed him because he agreed to take the Haitians from that camp. In order to get rid of a potential political problem for the administration, Haiti ended up with a dictator and the loss of their promised elections. So we deported by ICE Air, thousands of those Haitians back to Haiti. Not to Chile who wouldn’t take them, or Brazil, but to Haiti.
So naturally the camp collapsed under that. Because the Haitians that weren’t being deported, fled. When the first ones hit the tarmac, the cell phone selfies got going. And those Haitians fled by the thousands south back into Mexico to escape even the possibility of ending up back in Haiti. Dr. Ariel Henry is still the de facto leader of Haiti. The ambassador resigned in protest over the scuttling of the elections, and is talking about it to anybody who might ask.
Mr. Jekielek:
You have a chapter called The New Theologians in the book. This actually brings in a huge area of interest that I have beyond the border. Why The New Theologians?
Mr. Bensman:
For one thing, in a book like this, you have to give the big why, the big W. And when I speak to media or audiences, I’m constantly asked, “Why are they doing this?” People really need to understand the why of mass migration of this epic size.
The answer is that that there is an ideology that has been around for 50 years that holds that traditional national borders are an anachronism, that they are obsolete. It’s an ideology. And it’s so profound now, that it’s almost like a religion. This people adhere to this idea that the world should be borderless, that people have an inalienable right to migrate wherever they want, when they want, outside of any regard for what the nations that they’re entering want.
The Democratic mainstream has always rejected this. The Democratic Party has never believed in elimination of immigration law, elimination of deportation, the elimination of detention, or to abolish the ICE. This is a faction, it’s an ideological faction that is an extreme fringe part of the Democratic Party coalition, that has always been sidelined. Their ideas have never been able to gain traction.
But what happened was Donald Trump. He came in and he energized that faction to such an extent that they were empowered. Think Bernie Sanders. Once he was finished with them, he endorsed Joe Biden, and asked his faction to vote for Joe Biden. And when they did, he was obliged to give them authority and power.
When it came time for the presidential primary debates, the things that they were all saying universally were deportation and detention do not abide by current immigration law. It’s inhumane. Let’s put a red welcome carpet out for people crossing the southern border. We’re going to be humane, orderly, and were going to make it legal.
And that is exactly what they did as soon as they entered the White House. They had a problem because of Title 42, but they had been eroding and eroding it as fast as they can to get people access to the asylum system that I keep talking about. That’s their key.
So those people, the liberal progressives, gained control of the immigration and the border portfolio. Those people come from an immigrant advocacy industry, an industrial complex if you will, of non-governmental organizations. Alejandro Mayorkas is from that world. Most of the top advisors at the State Department, at DHS, and in the White House all come from the migrant advocacy industrial complex.
And they have a financial interest in mass migration. They gain government contracts that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And when they don’t have government contracts, they are fundraising based on this emergency that is created. “We must have funds to help us resettle these people to help them get their footing, etc.”
So, there’s the always a financial bottom line in this, but it’s never pitched like that. You’ll never hear it like that. What you’ll hear is that there is an inalienable right for all people of the world to go wherever they want, and it is inhumane to stop them. Immigration enforcement is cruel and punishing. Deportation is even more so.
And they will tell you, they say in their writings that when we deport them to places like Haiti, those are death flights, that our detention centers are concentration camps, and that ICE agents are concentration camp guards. We saw this throughout the riots of 2020, in the placards and the graffiti—Abolish ICE, ICE and Detention Center are Nazis, the embodiment of Nazis.
Of the presidential candidates who were mainstream, most of them were kind of mainstream on the Left. But Kamala Harris and all the rest of them incorporated those street placards and the graffiti right into their immigration platforms.
Mr. Jekielek:
Something that you have recently exposed is there are actually people being let into the country that are illegal immigrants that have been pre-approved for entry, prior to hitting the border. I can’t even believe I’m saying those words, but explain to me what’s going on.
Mr. Bensman:
Alejandro Mayorkas, he is a new theologian. This is his religion. He comes from that segment of the coalition. From the beginning, he has parroted their demands, which is to create a safe, orderly, humane, legal pathway into the United States over the border. And they have talked about systematically creating those pathways.
There are two things that they did. One is that the administration sent emissaries to Columbia, Panama, and Costa Rica, bottleneck places on the migration trail that are very dangerous and deterring on their own. It has cut deals privately, secretly, confidentially with those governments, to allow immigrants to bypass the danger parts, and to reduce the time through the jungle on the pathways from a week, to 10 days, to 48 hours.
With the ascent of the Panamanian government, they have agreed to pull their patrol boats off the rivers and out of the way of the ocean route, to allow these migrant boats to pass further up and avoid the most dangerous parts. That is creating a safe pathway, just like they said. But it also will invite far more people to do it, because it’s less dangerous.
So, those are in place now as we speak. I’ve written about that. The Darien Gap, which is a notorious passage, is no longer the notorious passage that you thought it was, that people thought it was. They’ve cut it short now.
The other thing that they are doing is to create legal pathways. They said they would do it, and they’re doing it, which is to say that immigrants who were planning to cross illegally can now get in a queue all along the border on the Mexican side. And then, the Mexican government will, in coordination with the American government, provide legal permission to cross at a port of entry.
And once they do that, they are then given permission to work and to go anywhere in the country that they want, until one day they might apply for asylum. The asylum that I’ve been talking about all along, which just enables them to stay forever. Many of them won’t even bother applying for asylum. It will be, “Come and get me.”
That legal pathway has been developing all through 2022 very secretively. There is no advertising going on. But it is happening now at ports of entry from the Pacific Coast, Tijuana, all the way to Brownsville at the Gulf of Mexico, probably at seven or eight different ports of entry so far. Thousands upon thousands a day are being crossed in legally through the ports of entry.
And it shouldn’t be a surprise. Mayorkas was telling us all along, “We are going to create legal pathways to cross the southern border.” That’s unprecedented. Nothing like that has ever happened in the annals of either party. That is not Democratic mainstream thought or policy. That is something truly extreme, and also legally questionable. Because the authority that they’re citing for allowing these people in in large numbers is called humanitarian parole.
Humanitarian parole is in the INA. It’s an allowable authority, but on a one-off basis. A guy is sick, struggling up the river bank. We’re not going to deport a guy with a missing a leg or whatever the situation may be. And in that one case, we’ll issue a humanitarian parole.
This administration is using humanitarian parole for massive categories of people all at once. There is litigation about this that probably will end up before the Supreme Court. But in the meantime, they’re issuing this as the main legal document that has allowed probably a million-and-a-half, 2 million people that have been brought into the country over the borders into the country.
What this does is it makes it safer. Because now they don’t have to pay cartels to cross. They just enter a sheltered system, and the Mexicans escort them to the Americans. I was allowed exclusive access into a Mexican shelter where they’re doing it. I interviewed them.
I interviewed the Mexicans that are in charge of the operation, three different shelter managers in Tijuana and Mexicali who said, “We can’t keep up with the demand now. We keep having to expand our shelters, and add new shelters. Because selfies are going back to the village by cell phone. ‘Hey, they’re letting us in and we don’t have to pay the cartels. It’s cheap. Everybody come now while the getting is good.'”
I expect that the remaining couple of years of the Biden administration will feature a significant percentage of border entries that come in this way. But you can’t put a news drone overhead. You can’t see it. And so, the American people would not know about this. And you certainly don’t see them on the other end when they board buses and head to cities across the United States, right from the ports of entry. They’re very excited about this.
Mr. Jekielek:
When you’re talking about people being put on these buses across, I’m reminded of something we talked about off camera, which are these Ant operations, as you described them. So how does that work?
Mr. Bensman:
Okay. Remember, most presidents have some kind of a surge or something happens, but they don’t want it to happen. So they work hard to reverse it.
Under this administration, it was the opposite. For the first time, an American president encouraged it, and said he didn’t want to stop it, and wasn’t going to stop it.
Mr. Jekielek:
But by that do you mean what’s called la invitation? Is that what you’re talking about here?
Mr. Bensman:
Yes. La invitation came to me from a smuggler that I interviewed in Ojinaga, Mexico who worked for the La Linea cartel. Just a couple of months into the administration, business was booming in an area where it had never boomed before. And I asked him, “To what do you owe your incredible prosperity?” And he said, “La invitation.” I said, “What do you mean by that?”
He says, “Joe Biden issued an invitation to the whole world to come, and they have not stopped coming. We’ve never seen anything like this.” So, that’s where I came up with la invitation, because it really was an invitation. The specific policy that he was talking about was an early one that the Biden administration did, which was to suspend all interior deportations. Something that has never been done. No Democrat had ever done anything like that.
And then, the word went out to the world that if you could get past Border Patrol, which is a 100-mile zone of jurisdiction for Border Patrol, you would never be deported. You would never have to worry about deportation. That was the specific thing that he was talking about. He said that when Biden ended deportations, business boomed. It was la invitation.
Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s go back to these Ant operations then.
Mr. Bensman:
Right. When Trump was in office, he had to put together a multilayered ad hoc bunch of policies, because he couldn’t get anything passed in Congress, he just had to do it himself. One of the key ones was that he persuaded the Mexican government under threat of tariffs to deploy their national guard at their southern border with Guatemala. That is a choke point on the immigration trail that almost all immigrants pass through to get to the U.S. border.
Prior to that, they would just cross through and get a bus or hire somebody to get them up to the border. Donald Trump asked the Mexicans to put their military down there and stop them. And by doing that, they would not want to be coming through Mexico. They would just stay home. And it worked while Trump was in office.
Because Trump said, “If you don’t do this, we are going to put a tariff, progressive trade tariffs all the way up to 28 per cent. We’ll start small. And if you don’t comply, it’ll get bigger and bigger until your economy is destroyed.”
And they believed him. So, they put those troops down there, and they started to muck up the immigration through there by requiring that they apply for Mexican asylum. If they didn’t apply for Mexican asylum, they’d be deported back to Honduras or wherever they’re from, kicked back into Guatemala.
When Biden came into office, he asked the Mexicans to maintain that. But he pulled the threat of tariffs. “We’re not like that. We don’t do that. We’ll give you money instead, carrots instead of stick.”
So the Mexicans responded by pretending to do it still. But when the numbers reached a critical mass, 40, 50,000 in this city of Tapachula, they started to riot and say, “Let us go.” And the Mexicans devised some very creative ways to make that happen.
One of the ways that they did it was to wheel up 3 or 400 buses, load them up, and bring them to different cities, dispersed across Northern Mexico, so that nobody could see a big politically problematic clump of people coming in a caravan, or a Haiti migrant camp under the bridge sort of thing.
They call that an Ant operation. It comes from Mexican cartel drug smuggling. Which is to say that we send onesies and twosies in a long line with drugs in a lot of long lines, so that nobody really notices that it’s happening. Or if you block one of the lines, they’re still coming in these other lines. And the Mexican government adopted that tactic to move people out of Tapachula, and then still pretend like they’re abiding by the agreement with the Biden administration.
This is an extremely duplicitous, tricky, backstabbing, diplomatically-problematic move by the Mexicans that they were able to get away with, and still are to this day, because the Biden administration doesn’t care as long as it’s not visible. When it gets visible, they care. They do deportations to Haiti. They get tough when they need to, when it serves their short-term political interests. Ant operations are great for the Mexicans. They relieve the pressure. And it’s great for the administration, because they get to allow everybody in and nobody’s the wiser.
Mr. Jekielek:
How do you get people to talk to you, to tell you that they’re involved in these things? I would imagine people would not want to talk to you and expose these types of things happening.
Mr. Bensman:
By just being on the ground. You have to go to the places and interview the people that are managing these problems. On the Ant operation, the first time that I really realized it was on a trip to Tapachula. I interviewed the city’s main newspaper publisher who described the whole thing to me, laid the whole thing out.
He says, “Yes, here’s what they did. They handed out these special visas, QR code visas to everybody, and gave them a few days. And we wheeled up buses. And you had to show your QR code to get on a certain bus that went to a certain city.” And he explained the whole thing.
And then later then you could find these QR code visas on the ground in Texas discarded. So it wasn’t very hard to put it together. And then you could interview the immigrants who had these QR codes about what happened.
The first time that I really saw this happen was the Haitian migrant camp crisis. Because when I asked the immigrants themselves, “Why did you guys all show up at once?” Which seems like an obvious question. And I spent a couple of days interviewing dozens of Haitians. They all had the same story. “We were stuck in Tapachula. They wouldn’t let us go. And we rioted. We had riots day, after day, after day.
And there was a big national Mexican holiday coming called El Grito. It’s a week long celebration that goes on all over Mexico. And they were coming up the next week. And the Tapachula authorities and the federal authorities felt like this was going to interrupt the celebrations. So they wheeled up buses and said, ‘Whatever applications you had, don’t worry about it. You’re clear to go all at once.'”
The buses went to Del Rio, because Del Rio happened to be a spot where the cartels are not charging to cross. It’s one of the few spots along the border where you can get over free. You could cross yourself and nobody will kill you for it. They all knew about this on social media. The Mexicans let them all go to make a national holiday happen in Tapachula.
If Donald Trump had been president at that time, there would have been repercussions. But there were not repercussions. And so the Mexican government kept doing it. They did it again, and again, and again, in different ways. They used the QR codes the next time because they didn’t want a clump showing up.
They made a mistake with the Haitians, because they showed up in a big clump under the bridge. So, the next time they did it with the QR codes. They showed up and scattered all along the border.
Mr. Jekielek:
This is an incredible body of knowledge that you’re sharing here. And I encourage everyone to actually pick up your book and read it. Because we’ve only just really scraped the surface here with some unbelievable stories.
On the one hand, you’re saying that things have been changed irrevocably. On the other hand, you’re saying that there is hope. What do you see there, and what do you think needs to happen at this point given the body of knowledge that you’ve just exposed?
Mr. Bensman:
Well for one thing, immigration, especially illegal immigration, the factors that shape it are not well understood. The American people don’t understand how it works, why it works, and why what happens is happening. And until they do, they won’t really be able to weigh in that something wrong is happening or something that you like is happening.
But the mass migration crisis is going to be felt eventually by everybody in the country. Their school districts, their health systems, and tax rates, and everything. They’re going to feel this. They’ll have a choice at the ballot box in 2024 after two more years of this, and millions of more people. Lawmakers will need to make choices and draft laws that will hopefully meet the demands of their voters, one way or another.
My feeling is that the Democratic Party, which is responsible for allowing its progressives to do this, really does not want this. The Democratic Party has never been for any of this.
Barack Obama, they used to call him the Deporter-in-Chief. Recently he was quoted saying, “This is not sustainable. We can’t have a country that just lets everybody in.” And Bill Clinton recently said the same thing in an interview he said, “This is wrong. We can’t do this.”
If the Democrats maintain power at the ballot box, the pragmatic rebels that I write about in White House Rebellion, the chapter on White House Rebellion, will be given the power that they need to overcome the progressives and reverse this. They may do it voluntarily without even having to get voted out.
But it may be that they’re just going to have to get voted out, in which case the book will provide the comprehension and the historical documentation about how this happened to be able to back out, to reverse engineer, and to actually be able to affect change and shut this down.
Mass illegal immigration is not an inevitable thing. It does not have to happen. The laws that Congress passed over the years, bipartisan laws with votes, are more than sufficient to take care of this sort of thing. They just have to be enforced.
We don’t need immigration reform. We need the asylum law to be rebuilt. And there’s a couple of legal loopholes. The Flores Loophole, which we didn’t talk about. There’s a couple quick fixes here that any bipartisan Congress should be able to easily put together.
With the outcome of the midterm elections, it looks like we’re going into another two years like this. By the end of the next two years, the country will be feeling it. I just saw a story in an Omaha, Nebraska newspaper yesterday about, “Oh my God, we’re being flooded with these illegal immigrants. What’s happening? Why is this happening? All of our shelters are overwhelmed.” This is Nebraska. That is going to be happening all over the country.
My last chapter is concerned with a school district in Texas, Liberty County, Texas, where I spent most of a week, that has been overwhelmed with 50 to 75,000 illegal immigrant families that have absolutely swamped the school district, and caused irrevocable change throughout this little rural Texas county. That is maybe an extreme version of what’s happening, what the rest of America should see.
But it is a good way to see what’s in store for your school district and for your community after another couple years of this, and certainly after another four years beyond that. So, I’m hoping that the book, and my last chapter will open some eyes as well as to what this really looks like, this kind of transformational impact from this crisis.
Mr. Jekielek:
Todd Bensman, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Mr. Bensman:
Thank you. I’m honored to have been here. Thank you.
Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Todd Bensman and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.
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