Excerpts
Chanel Rianne: You’ve been at the border for the past week. What have you seen?
Bensman: The reason I came to the Big Bend Sector of the border is because there’s been a 365 percent increase in single adults being apprehended after coming through this vast, wilderness territory. As opposed to just a few dozen or hundreds in any given month, they’ve had 15,000 come through here just through the month of March. What that tells me is that the cartel smuggling figures that the Border Patrol presence here is very thin, or there’s no defense at all. So what’s happening is that they’re exploiting this area. It’s long-distance smuggling. They’re looking for young, adult males and females and charging them $10,000, $11,000 a head for five or six day journeys through here. They’re finding very little Border Patrol presence here. There might be a half a dozen for a 60-mile stretch of river, and so that’s money for the smuggler.